The Roman Law Tradition

In The Roman Law Tradition an international team of distinguished legal scholars explore the various ways in which Roman law has affected and continues to affect patterns of legal decision-making throughout the world. Roman law began as the local law of a small Italian city. It grew to dominate the legal relationships of the Mediterranean basin for the first five hundred years of our era. The revival of its study in the mediaeval universities led to its influencing the subsequent development of the legal system of western Europe and thereafter those parts of the rest of the world colonised from Europe. Roman legal ideas penetrated procedure as well as the substance of law and assisted the process of harmonisation and codification of local customary laws. Techniques of legal reasoning which first emerge in Rome continue in daily use. Roman law was also of immense significance in the emergence of modern political thought. Few scholars have written as widely and influentially on the Roman legal tradition as Peter Stein, former Regius Professor of Civil Law in the University of Cambridge. As a tribute to and continuation of his work, the present volume brings together twelve studies, ranging in time from republican Rome to the European Court of Human Rights, which together provide an emphatic endorsement of the continued importance and vitality of that tradition.

The Roman Law Tradition

The Roman Law Tradition Edited by

A. D. E. Lewis University College London

and

D. J. Ibbetson Magdalen College, Oxford

1 CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Published by the Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB2 1RP 40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA 10 Stamford Road, Oakleigh, Melbourne, 3166, Australia © Cambridge University Press, 1994 First published 1994 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress cataloguing in publication data

The Roman law tradition / edited by A. D. E. Lewis and D. J. Ibbetson. p. cm. ISBN 0 521 44199 4 (hardback) 1. Roman law. I. Lewis, A. D. E. II. Ibbetson, D. J. (David J.) KJA147.R66 1994 340.5'4-dc20 93-24746 CIP ISBN 0 521 44199 4 hardback Transferred to digital printing 2004

CE

Contents

List of contributors Foreword: Peter Stein, Regius Professor of Civil Law in the University of Cambridge, 1968-1993 List of abbreviations 1 The Roman law tradition

page ix xi xii 1

DAVID IBBETSON AND ANDREW LEWIS

2 Labeo and the fraudulent slave

15

ALAN RODGER

3 Doing and causing to be done

32

PETER BIRKS

4 The danger of definition: contrectatio and appropriation

54

DAVID IBBETSON

5 Going to the fair - Jacques de Revigny on possession

73

WILLIAM M. GORDON

6 Bembo giureconsulto?

98

MICHAEL H. CRAWFORD

7 Gentilis and the interpretatio duplex

104

J. L. BARTON

8 Ius gentium in the practice of the Court of Admiralty around 1600

119

ALAIN WIJFFELS

9 Stair's title 'Of Liberty and Servitude'

135

JOHN D. FORD

10 The actio communi dividundo in Roman and Scots law

159

GEOFFREY MACCORMACK vii

viii

Contents

11 Sale and transfer of title in Roman and Scots law

182

DAVID JOHNSTON

12 'What Marcellus says is against you': Roman law and Common law

199

ANDREW LEWIS

13 Audi et alteram partem: a limit to judicial activity

209

DAAN ASSER

Index of sources Index of names and subjects

224 229

Contributors

is Advocate General at the Supreme Court of the Netherlands and Professor of Civil Procedure at the Catholic University of Nijmegen.

DAAN ASSER

j . L. BARTON is All Souls Reader in Roman Law in the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Merton College. PETER BIRKS,

Oxford.

FBA, is Regius Professor of Civil Law in the University of

MICHAEL H. CRAWFORD,

University of London. JOHN D. FORD

Cambridge.

FBA, is Professor of Ancient History in the

is a Research Fellow of Gonville and Caius College,

WILLIAM M. GORDON

of Glasgow. DAVID IBBETSON

is Douglas Professor of Civil Law at the University

is a Fellow and Tutor in Law at Magdalen College,

Oxford. an advocate at the Scots Bar, succeeds Peter Stein in the Regius Chair of Civil Law in the University of Cambridge in October 1993.

DAVID JOHNSTON,

ANDREW LEWIS

is Senior Lecturer in Laws at University College London

GEOFFREY MACCORMACK

of Aberdeen. ALAN RODGER,

Advocate.

is Professor of Jurisprudence at the University

The Rt Hon. Lord Rodger of Earlsferry, QC, is the Lord

is Professor of Legal History at the Universities of Leiden and Louvain-la-Neuve and formerly a Research Fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge.

ALAIN WIJFFELS

ix

Foreword: Peter Stein, Regius Professor of Civil Law in the University of Cambridge, 1968-1993

Bracton got his Roman law from the Glossators, Hale from the Humanists and Austin from the Pandectists. In each case the English writer was affected by the form and tendency of his source. Bracton found a legal grammar with which he was able to build up a picture of English law in substantive rather than procedural terms. Hale found an account of the parallel development of law and society from a primitive to a sophisticated system. Austin found the categories and tools of analysis with which to test the scientific quality of the law against an external standard.

This passage from his inaugural lecture as Regius Professor of Civil Law in Cambridge, Roman Law and English Jurisprudence Yesterday and Today (Cambridge, 1969), witnesses to the depth and range of Peter Stein's scholarship. He has made major contributions to jurisprudence and its history, and he is a master of the western European legal tradition and its Roman foundation. His writings have ranged across the whole field of the Roman legal tradition: the substantive Roman law and its reflection in modern legal systems, both Common law and civilian, from Scotland to San Marino; the resurgence of Roman law in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and legal humanism in the sixteenth; the basic forms of legal reasoning and modes of legal analysis; Roman legal ideas and their pervasive influence on political philosophy. Few scholars command more affection and admiration, and few have done more to illuminate not only Roman law as it was in its first life but also the huge contribution of the Roman law library to both the principal legal families in modern Europe. His long and immensely fruitful tenure of the Cambridge chair has also brought many to depend on his permanent availability as a leader and defender of a particular view of the law and legal education, as requiring, indispensably, an historical foundation. PETER BIRKS

Regius Professor of Civil Law, University of Oxford xi

Abbreviations

A.C. All E.R. B. & Aid. B. &. C. B.G.B. B.I.D.R. B. &S. Bing. Bulstr. Burr. C. C.B. C.L.J. C.L.P. Cmnd. Co. Rep. Coll. Const. Cr.App.Rep. Crim.L.R. Cro.Eliz. D. F. FIRA G. or Gaius Gl. H.t. J.Inst. Kel. L.Q.R. Lib.Ass. Xll

Law Reports, Appeal Cases All England Law Reports Barnewall and Alderson's Reports Barnewall and Cresswell's Reports Biirgerliches Gesetzbuch (German Civil Code) Bulletino dell'Instituto di Diritto Romano Best and Smith's Reports Bingham's Reports Bulstrode's Reports Burrow's Reports Codex Justinianus Common Bench Reports Cambridge Law Journal Current Legal Problems Command Paper Coke's Reports Collatio Legum Mosaicarum et Romanarum Constitutio(n) Criminal Appeal Reports Criminal Law Review Croke's Reports of the time of Elizabeth I Digesta or Dunlop's Court of Session Cases Faculty Decisions, Court of Session Fontes Iuris Romani Antejustiniani (ed. S. Riccobono et alii, 2nd edn (Florence, 1968)) The Institutes of Gaius Gloss(a) Hoc titulo Justinian's Institutes Sir John Kelyng's Reports Law Quarterly Review Liber Assisarum

List of abbreviations Lord Raym. M. M. &W. Mod. O.J.L.S. P.R.O. P.S. Q.B. R. R. &. R. S. S.C. S.D.H.I. S.L.T. Salk. Stra. T.R. T.v.R. Tab. W.B1. W.L.R. Wils. Y.B. Z.S.S.

Lord Raymond's Reports Morison's Dictionary of Decisions Meeson and Welsby's Reports Modern Reports Oxford Journal of Legal Studies Public Record Office Pauli Sententiae Law Reports, Queen's Bench Division Rettie, Crawford and Melville, Court of Session Cases Russell and Ryan's Crown Cases Reserved Shaw's Session Cases, first series Session Cases Studia et Documenta Historiae et Iuris Scots Law Times Reports Salkeld's Reports Strange's Reports Term Reports Tijdschrift voor Rechtsgeschiednis Twelve Tables William Blackstone's Reports Weekly Law Reports Wilson's King's Bench Reports Year Book Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung fur Rechtsgeschichte: romanistische Abteilung

Xlll

1

The Roman law tradition David Ibbetson and Andrew Lewis

Roman law was first the local law of a small central Italian city-state. 1 As the political boundaries of that state expanded, so did its law, until by the early centuries of our era its influence was widespread over and beyond the Mediterranean basin. Important evidence revealing the application of Roman law at local level has recently been dug up in southern Spain; the Roman lawyer and administrator Papinian is said to have been at the northern British capital York assisting the Emperor in dispensing justice in AD 208; and papyri from Egypt and the Arabian desert indicate the extent of penetration of Roman legal notions even in areas of strong local traditions. Conveyances written on wood in Transylvania testify to a near-obsessive desire to comply with metropolitan standards. The Roman legal tradition was characterised not so much by its substantive rules as by its intellectual methodology. Between about 100 BC and AD 250 the Roman jurists developed techniques of analogical and deductive reasoning which produced a jurisprudence of enormous refinement and sophistication.2 When the Emperor Justinian caused the substantial extracts from the writings of these classical jurists to be collected together in the early sixth century AD, he ensured the survival of their thought into subsequent ages. His Digest remains the finest monument of any legal culture. 1

Studies of the history of Roman law are legion. The most recent comprehensive survey is F. Wieacker, Romische Rechtsgeschichte, vol. I (Berlin, 1988, continuing). A useful survey in English is the edition of H. F. Jolowicz's Historical Introduction to the Study of Roman

Law by B. Nicholas (Cambridge, 1972), which was originally written to complement

W. W. Buckland's Textbook of Roman Law from Augustus to Justinian, now in its third

2

edition, by Peter Stein (Cambridge, 1963). There are numerous studies of the mediaeval development of Roman law in the collection Ius Romanum Medii Aevi (Milan, 1961—), which have full bibliographical references, and the ways in which Roman law came to influence western philosophy are well charted by J. M. Kelly, A Short History of Western Legal Theory (Oxford, 1992). Peter Stein's own contributions have spanned the whole field. Many of his essays are collected together in The Character and Influence of the Roman Civil Law (London, 1988); see too his Regulae Iuris (Edinburgh, 1966) and The Teaching of Roman Law in England Around 1200 (London, 1990). For discussion of the jurists' techniques of interpretation, see Alan Rodger, 'Labeo and the Fraudulent Slave', below, pp. 15-31.

1

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David Ibbetson and Andrew Lewis

As the political fortunes of the Roman state waned, so did its direct legal influences. Nevertheless, albeit in Greek dress, it continued to apply within the limits of the Eastern Empire until the fall of Constantinople in 1453. During this long period it succeeded in directly influencing the legal traditions of neighbouring states. For example, its penetration into Slavic territories is well recognised, while significant parts of the Islamic law which developed after 661 have recently been traced to Roman roots. The western successor states of the fifth and sixth centuries continued an administrative pattern modelled on that of the previous local Roman government, and this involved a commitment to Roman law, applied side-by-side with Germanic custom. Unsurprisingly, the law codes of these Germanic states reveal some infiltration of Roman legal ideas, though these survivals became progressively more corrupt. Still, the Christian Church continued to keep alive Roman ideas and solutions, even in such unpromising territory as Anglo-Saxon England, and the most fundamental ideas of Roman law were sustained in scholarly environments familiar with such works as Isidore of Seville's Etymologia. The revival of the Roman law tradition stemmed from the concurrence of two conditions. First was the intellectual renaissance of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. While there may have been a continuous, if sparse, acquaintance with the Institutes, Code and Novels of Justinian from the time of their promulgation in the sixth century, there is no trace of the most important of the Justinianic tetralogy, the Digest, until the eleventh century, when two copies come to light. One, now known as the Littera Pisana or Fiorentina from the two Italian cities which successively preserved it, was a copy made within a generation of the original production. The other, known since Mommsen as the Codex Secundus, disappeared in the mediaeval period, though its contents were preserved in very many copies. All mediaeval scholarship was based on this text; the Florentine, treated almost as a sacred relic, was little studied before the Renaissance. The pattern of appearance of the Codex Secundus strongly suggests that it emerged into a strongly Lombardic legal world, perhaps into the wellknown Lombard law school at Padua, though our earliest reliable evidence of its study fixes it in Bologna. Here there developed in the early twelfth century a strong scholarly tradition around Irnerius, and his pupils, the so-called Four Doctors: Hugo, Martinus, Bulgarus and Jacobus. This intellectual resurgence provided no more than the launching-pad for the revival of Roman law. Setting it off were the political circumstances of the dispute between Pope and Emperor known as the Investiture Crisis, the question by whom and at what moment bishops and lesser clergy were to be invested with the symbols of their sacred and secular

The Roman law tradition

3

functions. The heat of this dispute lasted between 1075 and 1122, and for a long period both the imperial and papal powers encouraged their supporters to seek for any and every argument to support their cause. Amongst the sources culled for this purpose were the written remains of Roman law preserved in the Digest, Code and Institutes of Justinian. Foremost amongst the scholars who applied this learning to the new political uses was the imperial apologist Peter Crassus. Significantly, Crassus was a citizen of Ravenna, the Byzantine capital of reconquered Italy; here the Roman traditions were most obviously retained, and it may be surmised that it was here that Justinian's texts had been preserved. The first century of scholarly work on the Roman texts was largely devoted to teasing out the meanings of the very heterogeneous opinions and materials contained in Justinian's Corpus Iuris Civilis. Four generations of students link Irnerius, through the Four Doctors, their students Rogerius, Placentinus, Pillius and the student of these in turn, Johannes Bassianus, with Azo and Accursius in the early thirteenth century.3 Whilst these teachers produced a great variety of literature in their exploration of the understanding of their texts, they are chiefly remembered (and were in due course execrated) for their glosses to the text. Accursius found fame and notoriety as the compiler of the fullest and most widely diffused gloss, known as the Great Gloss or glossa ordinaria, which eventually found its way into the standard manuscript tradition and ultimately into the printed editions of the Corpus Iuris. Later generations criticised the glossators for their narrow-minded literalness and absence of a wider cultural context, but the very narrowness imposed upon them by their task gave them an unrivalled knowledge of the Roman law texts on which their successors could build. Moreover, it is as well to remember that the Bolognese school did not come into being as a research institute, but as a teaching institution for immediate practical need: it needs to be constantly re-emphasised that Roman law at this time was not a dry university subject, but a matter of everyday utility throughout Europe. The law school at Bologna became the centre for the scholarly study of the Roman law texts, and all who wished to advance themselves in literate employment outside the church obtained their training there. The link between law and public administration which remains strong in the continental European tradition began here. This first wave of reception of Roman law into the European legal tradition had many, intertwined, aspects. Three principal lines stand out. Most obvious is the infiltration of Roman law into written texts; behind this lies a widespread acceptance of Roman law as a subsidiary source of 3

See further William M. Gordon, 'Going to the Fair - Jacques de Revigny on Possession', below, pp. 73-97.

4

David Ibbetson and Andrew Lewis

law, filling in the gaps left by customary law; and finally there is the general adoption of the refined Roman techniques of legal reasoning. As the general rate of literacy increased, there was a consequent rise in the respect accorded to written text and a tendency to reduce law into writing. Roman law provided both a technical vocabulary and a conceptual structure with which local customary law could be explicated. By so affecting the way in which law was conceived and expressed, Roman ideas profoundly influenced - one might say determined - the course of European legal history. This is most visible in the writings of legal commentators; in England, for example, the debt of Glanvill in the twelfth century and that of Bracton in the thirteenth to Roman law are strikingly obvious: whole sections from the latter are copied directly from Justinian's Institutes or the commentaries of Azo, and even those sections apparently most English can be shown to have close connexion with the classical Roman texts. Less obviously, but no less significantly, as local customary law came to be committed to writing there was an infiltration of Roman ideas. Sometimes this might have been conscious and deliberate, as in those Italian city-states whose pro-imperial ideology had caused them to treat Roman law as properly a part of their own customary law. Sometimes, however, it was less conscious, the product of relying on universitytrained lawyers to prepare the written text: hence - to select only a sample of geographically distinct examples - there are Roman characteristics in the earliest written Norwegian code, the Gulathingslov, in a substantial number of English and Irish borough custumals, and in the majority of the French Coutumes of the thirteenth century. Even more, there was huge Roman influence on legislation, both national (the Spanish Siete Partidas and the French Etablissements of Louis IX, for example) and local. Urban codes were particularly influential in bringing about a diffusion of Roman ideas: the German laws of Liibeck and Magdeburg were widely adopted throughout central and eastern Europe, and the Spanish Fuero Real through much of Spain. The use which had been made of the Roman legal texts in the Investiture controversy gave Roman law a status as essentially a supranational body of legal principles. In the hands of the Spanish scholastics of the sixteenth century and Grotius and his followers in the seventeenth and eighteenth, they were to form the base of an elaborate system of Natural law, an idealised system to which national laws might aspire. While the glossators and commentators similarly treated them as an ideal, they saw them as having a more practical revelance, supplementing the patchwork of local and national laws when these did not give any definitive answer to questions. There developed a widespread practice of academic lawyers giving consilia - opinions - to courts on disputed points of law. In some

The Roman law tradition

5

places university-trained lawyers had more direct input into legal practice; in the multi-member parlements of France, for example, they ensured a place for Roman law solutions despite both local and regal opposition to it. Judges operating outside their own immediate region, such as the podestd imported into Italian city-states, inclined towards judgments which could be supported by appeal to the written texts of Roman law when local custom was lacking or uncertain, if only to minimise the risk that they might themselves fall foul of the rule which provided that they should be personally liable for a litigant's loss if they gave a wrong judgment. All of these had the effect of providing a common substructure to the laws of continental Europe, wherever the influence of the professors had been pronounced, underpinning the common heritage of the written texts. Just as importantly, the activities of the mediaeval Roman lawyers had ensured the survival of the rigorous analytical method of the classical jurists. Treating the Corpus Iuris as an authoritative text, they attempted to harmonise the arguments found there; while this essentially quixotic task ultimately led to much criticism, it did require the development of increasingly refined techniques of analysis. Moreover, because of the work of the academic lawyers called on to apply Roman law in the courts, these techniques which had been developed within the universities became a ubiquitous feature of European legal practice. This general infiltration of Roman legal ideas and practices in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries can be regarded as thefirstwave of the reception of Roman law. It marked, most crucially, the absorption of the methodological aspects of the Roman tradition into mediaeval Europe, and thence into the modern world. The second wave of the reception of Roman legal ideas occurred in the sixteenth century. At an academic level, this was a product of the humanist scholars' perception of antiquity, an important dimension of which was provided by Roman legal sources. Exploration of the juristic texts transmitted from the Middle Ages, alongside recently recovered inscriptional evidence, led Antonio Agustin, Alciatus and their contemporaries to the earliest understandings of the historical dimension of Roman law.4 It was on the basis of these explanations that later generations of Roman law scholars like Cujas (1522-90) and Donellus (d. 1591), working in northern Europe, were able to establish more critical and reliable editions of the basic texts. As well as this academic aspect there was, most notably in Germany, a practical side to the second wave of reception. At the beginning of the 4

See Michael H. Crawford, 'Bembo giureconsulto?', below, pp. 98-103.

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David Ibbetson and Andrew Lewis

sixteenth century there was a large range of local customary jurisdictions, reflecting Germany's notorious political fragmentation. In 1495 the remodelled imperial Supreme Court, the Reichskammergericht, adopted a written procedure. This written procedure was modelled on that found in the ecclesiastical courts, akin to that of the late Roman legal sources (as the common term 'Romano-canonical' implies). Moreover, just as the ecclesiastical practitioners had naturally looked to Roman law for solutions to substantive legal problems, so too the Reichskammergericht applied the 'common law of the Empire', i.e. the Roman Empire, which naturally meant Roman law. While the ground had been prepared to some extent by the Roman ideas present in the urban codes of the thirteenth century, it was only in the sixteenth that there was any wholesale or conscious Romanisation of German law. The direct importance of this was at first limited as large portions of the Empire were in practice privileged from its jurisdiction, but under its influence the independent princes began in the course of the century to remodel their own high courts along the same lines. It was not, however, until it became general practice to give reasons for decisions and to report these that Roman law scholarship and the practice of the courts came together. Elsewhere in Europe, too, this second wave of the reception of the Roman legal tradition was significant. The humanist scholars of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had introduced a more historical criticism of the Roman texts, associated with a weakening of the belief in the Roman texts as revealing a near-authoritative supranational law. There was, in consequence, a greater influence on the harmonisation of Roman law with national and local laws. Paramount in this regard was Hugo Grotius' Introduction to the Jurisprudence of Holland (Inleidinge tot de Hollandsche Rechtsgeleertheyd), published in 1631. Writing in the vernacular rather than in Latin, he laid down the foundations of RomanDutch law which could be built on by his successors Vinnius, van Leeuwen, Voet and Noodt. A similar harmonisation was brought about in France by the works of Coquille and Dumoulin, for example, and in parts of Germany by Ulrich Zasius. But even where there was a move away from the traditional reverence for the Roman text, there was no such departure from the ideals of the Roman legal method: the practical dominance of reasoning by deduction and analogy was so deeply embedded that it was easily detachable from its roots in the writings of the Roman jurists. This harmonisation of Roman law and customary laws reached its peak with the codification movement in continental Europe, beginning with the Prussian Code of 1794. Most important of these codes by far was the French Code civil, dating back to 1804, in part at least because it was

The Roman law tradition

7

widely adopted in other countries. The heavy Roman influence - stemming from the pre-existing Roman substrate as well as from the university training of their draftsmen and of those writers such as Pothier on whom the draftsmen relied - is visible in all of these codes. At the same time, though, they introduced a formal diversity into the Romanised systems. Although as a matter of history it could be recognised that French law and German law, for example, had common roots in Roman law, as a matter of legal practice they were clearly distinct systems. No longer were the learned opinions of the professors of Roman law of any direct relevance to the determination of disputes in the courts; no longer was legal practice anchored on the rock of a common legal culture. While legal humanism had its part to play in the balancing of Roman law and customary law, the older methods of textual analysis continued to play their part too. Such analytical jurisprudence reached its high point in the writings of the Spanish neo-scholastics such as Molina and Covarruvias in the sixteenth century. Their writings, and the shorter but no less profound works of Grotius, provided the base for two separate traditions of considerable importance. Most notable was the growth of international law; the influence of Grotius' De lure Belli ac Pads was of paramount importance in the formulation of this common law of nations, but behind lay a tradition of writers and practitioners including Oxford's Regius Professor of Civil Law, Alberico Gentili (1552-1608).5 The second traditionflowingfrom the De lure Belli ac Pads was that of secular Natural law. St Thomas Aquinas, writing in the thirteenth century, had laid down a firm framework of Natural law, but this was strongly anchored in the theology of the Roman Catholic Church. This was hardly congenial to the post-Reformation Protestants, and still less so to the thinkers of the Enlightenment. Basing themselves firmly on a perception of human reason, such writers as Wolff and Thomasius expanded Grotius' systematic analysis into an all-embracing framework of ideal law. The paternity of the substantial categories of Roman law is transparent, as is the theoretical rooting of their position in the implicit belief of the mediaeval civil lawyers that Roman law represented a universally valid supranational system of legal principles. The close parallel between this form of Natural law and Roman law is clearly shown by the ease with which the ideas of the Natural lawyers flowed into the writings of the German Pandectists, culminating with Windscheid's very influential Lehrbuch des Pandektenrechts in 1862. Though it may not be so easily visible, Roman influence was none the less important in shaping the legal consciousness away from the principal 5

See J. L. Barton, 'Gentilis and the Interpretatio Duplex\ below, pp. 104-18.

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David Ibbetson and Andrew Lewis

centres of Roman law studies in continental Europe. In Scotland, for example, local customary and feudal law were dominant in the mediaeval period, though these owed much more to the Anglo-Norman influence introduced in the twelfth century than to native Celtic tradition. The constant interference of the more powerful state of England in its affairs, coupled with its less favourable commercial and agricultural base, prevented the emergence of a strong central government. Reforms and development of the judicature in the sixteenth century led to the introduction of Romano-canonical procedures into Scottish courts, which led in turn, as elsewhere, to the adoption of substantive Roman solutions.6 The first universities had been founded in Scotland in the course of the fifteenth century, but they seem not to have flourished, and it became the recognised practice for young Scots lawyers to travel to the continent for their legal education. This ensured that there was a steady supply of lawyers versed in the latest civilian scholarship to staff the Scottish courts. No system of instruction in local law existed to maintain the defences against the Roman encroachment; so much so that when the Faculty of Advocates, who controlled admission to legal practice before the courts, reformed their admission procedures in 1610 to include an examination, a considerable part was devoted to Roman law. As happened elsewhere in Europe, though, the tension between Roman law and customary law was satisfactorily resolved, though in the case of Scotland this did not lead to any written code. The proximity and continued influence of the avowedly non-Roman English legal system, and the survival of a strong native feudal tradition, led to the establishment of a distinctly Scottish legal tradition founded on the institutional writings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.7 England provides another variation on the theme of the infiltration of the Roman legal tradition into European legal culture. While there may have been some limited acquaintance with Roman legal ideas in the Anglo-Saxon period, it is not until the middle of the twelfth century that we begin to find evidence of detailed study of the Roman texts. At this time there was no gulf between the study and practice of law in England and the rest of Europe; and, as happened elsewhere in Europe, Roman ideas filtered into the English legal consciousness principally through written commentaries (Glanvill in the late twelfth century, Bracton in the mid thirteenth). Yet, again as occurred elsewhere, there may have been a 6

7

For examples of the parallels between Roman law and Scots law, see David Johnston, 'Sale and the Transfer of Title in Roman and Scots Law', below, pp. 182-98, and Geoffrey MacCormack, 'The Actio Communi Dividundo in Roman and Scots Law', below, pp. 159-81. See John D. Ford, 'Stair's Title "Of Liberty and Servitude'", below, pp. 135-58.

The Roman law tradition

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more direct influence on actual legislation. The creation of new proprietary remedies closely resembling the possessory interdicts of the Romans in the middle of the twelfth century has been considered by many scholars to indicate both knowledge of the Roman law and perhaps conscious borrowing from it. And when in the fourteenth century the royal courts articulate the custom of the realm that an innkeeper should be strictly liable for the loss of his guest's goods, it is not easy to avoid the conclusion that at some stage in the past the quasi-delictual liability of the Roman caupo had found its way into accepted English practice. This strong Roman influence on the Common law did not last beyond the end of the thirteenth century. Until the sixteenth century, English legal history is largely the story of the development of remedies based on indigenous procedures. There was little, if any, room for the use of Roman learning in such a context, and the vitality and apparent sufficiency of the local procedures prevented for some time the development of Romano-canonical alternatives in secular contexts. Moreover, the strong position of Roman law in continental universities was not mirrored in England, where its study was intermittently forbidden; advanced legal study (and education) in England took place in the Inns of Court rather than the universities, and was the study of the Common law rather than the Roman, of local procedure rather than general substance. Behind this, too, lay a strongly held ideological commitment to the insularity of the Common law and its separateness from the Civil law, which was seen to be at the base of continental systems. Those courts which did operate according to Civil law procedures - the ecclesiastical courts, the university courts of Oxford and Cambridge, and the Court of Admiralty8 - were marginalised by the courts of Common law notwithstanding their importance in practice. A potentially greater channel for the infiltration of Roman procedures and substantive law was the Court of Chancery, which crystallised in the late fourteenth century, whose procedure was never forced into the rigorous straitjacket of the Common law, and whose judges - the masters - had frequently received a university education. Even here, though, there is little real evidence of the direct borrowing of Roman legal ideas. The strength of the belief in the insularity of the Common law has protected it from wholesale supersession by Roman legal ideas. Nevertheless, from the later Middle Ages there have been several pulses of infiltration of Roman law into Common law. The first, rather ragged, movement occurred in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Most obviously there was a revival of the study of Bracton and of the use of his 8

See Alain Wijffels, 7MS Gentium in the Practice of the Court of Admiralty around 1600', below, pp. 119-34.

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text in Common law contexts in the wake of its printing in 1560; since Bracton had been a judge, the work attributed to him could be cited freely without any fear of being accused of trying to import Romanism into England. Less obviously, but more importantly, English lawyers seem to have had an increasing familiarity with the Roman texts. It was not merely that humanists like Thomas More were closely in touch with the principal currents in contemporary European culture, or even that scholarly lawyers at the end of the century - Thomas Egerton and Francis Bacon, for example - are known to have studied the Digest; the dearth of easily comprehensible texts on English law meant that reliance was increasingly placed on the basic literature of Roman law. Justinian's Institutes were widely recommended as an introductory legal text, and John Cowell transparently based his Institutiones Iuris Anglicani on them; the introduction to such a severely practical book as William West's Symbolaeography is a crude, and unacknowledged, translation of a contemporary civilian text.9 A second pulse, briefer but sharper in its focus, occurred around 1700, when the Roman ideas contained in Bracton and in the seventeenth-century Natural lawyers' writings enjoyed a brief vogue. The best-known product of this movement is the adoption by the Common law of the Roman rules relating to the standard of care demanded of bailees; but it can hardly be coincidental that much of the articulation of the Common law of torts at this time closely followed the lines laid down by the Roman jurists.10 After a period of relative quiescence, the Roman texts move into the light again in the first half of the nineteenth century.11 Ambiguities in the law of contract were resolved by reference to Roman law, often mediated through the works of Pothier; the law of easements was transformed from a cumbersome mediaeval structure (itself with a Roman base imported from Bracton) into one more in keeping with an urbanised society by direct borrowings from Roman and contemporary civilian texts. It may be that each of these pulses should be regarded as no more than a brief fashion; but each time the fashion died out, it left its legacy in the form of rules embedded in English law. In terms of substantive rules, one legacy of Roman law has been a considerable measure of uniformity throughout the legal systems of western Europe, stretching beyond this area into regions which adopted European-based codes. Most obviously, the Roman conceptual categories underpin both the structure of modern codified Civil law systems 9 10 11

We are grateful to Peter Stein for bringing this to our attention some years ago. See Peter Birks, 'Doing and Causing to be Done', below, pp. 32-53. See Andrew Lewis, '"What Marcellus Says is Against You": Roman law and Common law', below, pp. 199-208.

The Roman law tradition

11

and the structure of the contemporary uncodified Common law. The institutional division of the law into persons, things and actions, with the law of things further subdivided into property and obligations, is so familiar to students of the modern law that it is hard to recognise it for what it is, as an invention of the Roman jurists. At a more abstract level the Roman law tradition embodies not merely this common core of rules, but a common way of thinking about law. In the perception of the Roman jurists law was a discretefieldof knowledge, conceptually disembedded from the society in which it operated, yet very much a part of the heritage of that society. Legal learning was artificial learning; and lawyers were a distinct body of experts who had - or who claimed to have - mastered this learning. The post-Roman western legal tradition is underpinned by an identical commitment to the discreteness of law and to the professionalisation of lawyers. There is an enormous gulf between this conception and the more integrated social conception, where law is essentially indistinct from custom and practice, and where the nearest approach to a lawyer is the tribal elder who is perceived as remembering and articulating this custom. Treating law as a system of rules separate from social practice, the Roman jurists were forced to develop new forms of reasoning to enable them to identify valid rules. Following the model of the grammarians they used arguments of analogy and contrariety in order to demonstrate the essential similarity or dissimilarity of a new case to an established one, and developed techniques of induction and deduction in order to generate abstract principles from concrete cases and then to reason outwards from these principles to new situations, though invariably tempering these results with a sense of pragmatism. These techniques - not always coupled with pragmatism, it must be said - were used to great effect by the mediaeval jurists in their attempts to harmonise the apparently conflicting texts of the Justinianic corpus. Although the onset of humanism, with its stress on the accurate interpretation of texts, to a large degree undermined this particular form of very close legal analysis and exegesis, the essential principles of legal reasoning survived among both academic and practical lawyers. In the contemporary legal world their presence is most clearly marked in those states whose law has not undergone comprehensive codification, and where there has remained a strong commitment to the positivist thesis that law is a discrete field of rules and principles. Despite their denunciation as a sham by a range of legal theorists, the Roman jurists' techniques clearly continue to underpin the grammar of the modern Common law. Judges still use arguments by analogy identical to those used by the Roman jurists in order to distinguish one case from another;

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David Ibbetson and Andrew Lewis

and the same basic methods of induction and deduction enable the courts to generate principles and definitions from a set of specific cases and then to apply them to new situations.12 The same principles of reasoning form a part of the lawyers' armoury in codified legal systems too. In some places, such as Germany, they have remained powerful tools; in France their importance has been to some extent eroded in the twentieth century as a result of the increasing practical recognition of the quasi-legislative function of the judge, while in places like Switzerland the Code itself expressly authorises the judiciary to take into account extra-legal factors in order to mould the law to changing circumstances. Such a freedom to depart from previous practice, releasing judges from the shackles of strict legal reasoning, has inevitably diminished the centrality of formal canons of legal thinking. Even in these states, though, the Roman law method has been fully integrated into the whole structure of legal thought, and the widening of the scope of judicial discretion has done nothing to disturb the duality of legislation and interpretation which has characterised the post-Roman legal tradition. The influence of Roman law has not been confined to purely legal contexts; it has had a profound influence on the development of western political theory. Roman ideas lie at the basis of the mediaeval theory of the state. Already in the twelfth century, as has been seen, one significant reason for the revival of study of the Digest was its political utility in the hands of imperial apologists like Peter Crassus, who were able to cull from its texts support for a theocratic, absolutist conception of the state: 'quod principi placuit, legis habet vigorem' and 'princeps legibus solutus'. The prince himself is beyond the reach of the law; his will has the force of law. Such notions of regal supremacy were subsequently upheld at the start of the sixteenth century by Zasius and Bude, in Germany and France respectively; a century later English writers like John Cowell, who openly argued for the adoption of Roman legal categories as a means of imposing some structure on the mass of the Common law, were vilified for attempting to import such absolutist doctrines into England. On the other hand, a more 'democratic', conciliarist position was advanced by such writers as Azo and Hugolinus, stressing the origin of the prince's authority in the people's concession of authority - a concession which might in some circumstances be withdrawn. This approach is to be found, for example, in Bracton, and appears to have been the dominant one in the Middle Ages. Aquinas drew from the fact that the prince 12

For an example, see David Ibbetson, The Danger of Definition: Contrectatio and Appropriation', below, pp. 54-72.

The Roman law tradition

13

was said to be above the law the conclusion that this was because he could not in fact be brought before a court, but went on to argue that this in no way relieved him from the duty of voluntary obedience to its demands, citing in support a rescript of Theodosius from the Code: 'It is a saying worthy of the majesty of the ruler, if the prince professes himself bound by the laws; for even our own authority depends on that of the law.' These ideas, coupled with ideas drawn from the Roman civil law, formed the base of the social contractarianism that came to dominate political thinking in the seventeenth century, and whose influence is still strongly felt in twentieth-century political theory. A second feature of modern thought whose source can be traced back into the Roman texts is the idea of the Law of Nations, its name taken from the Latin ius gentium (the term commonly used before Bentham invented the phrase 'International Law'). International law has its roots in two principles. First was the realisation that nation-states had independent legal capacity or, to put it in Baldus' terms, 'The King is emperor in his kingdom', with all the legislative capacity and political independence of the Roman Emperor. The second principle, articulated by William of Ockham in the context of arguments seeking to limit the universalist claims of the Pope or Emperor, was of the equality of these states. The Roman notion of ius gentium was an attempt to express the apparent universality of legal ideas observed by the Romans in the legal systems of other peoples. In the hands of some sixteenth-century writers expressing the interests of the inhabitants of the newly discovered American continent, it came to signal the relationship between groups or nations, limiting the exploitation of the New by the Old World. Nations came to be seen as entities with legal rights and obligations, and their relationships with other nations were subjected to regulation in treatises like Gentili's De Legationibus, treating of the duties of ambassadors, and De lure Belli, on war. Channelled through Grotius' De lure Belli ac Pads, these ideas have formed the basis of the theory and practice of international law, the most substantial flowering of the Roman legal tradition in the twentieth century. Equally important in the twentieth century has been the revival and growth of theories of natural, or fundamental, rights. Some credit is due to William of Ockham, for his use of the subjective sense of ius, but again it was Grotius who laid down the essential groundwork for this in his Introduction to the Jurisprudence of Holland. Here Grotius expounded a national legal system based upon ideas of private rights; at many points his arguments are underpinned by concepts drawn straight from the Roman texts, as in the derivation of the modes of acquisition of property from the law of nature. It has been shown that his work (together with that of Samuel Pufendorf) lies behind Thomas Hobbes and John Locke,

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linking the ideas of private property and individual civic rights developed by the political theorists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries firmly into the Roman legal tradition. In the same way the basic moral values which form the classical principles of natural justice, the maxims audi alterant partem and nemo iudex in causa sua, form a part of this tradition, mediated through the Natural law writings of Grotius and his successors.13 The Roman law tradition has produced many and varied effects on the legal and intellectual map of the world. Its influences upon the legal systems of western Europe resulted in the age of colonialism in its being spread from Holland to South Africa, Sri Lanka and Indonesia; from France to Quebec, Louisiana and francophone Africa; and from Spain to Texas, South America and the Philippines. Post-colonial export of the tradition has been most marked in Japan and Turkey, though China has also been influenced to a certain extent. Everywhere it has had an influence through the western tradition of political thought. Codification and the influence of subsequent legal orders has modified but not fundamentally altered the importance of this living cultural tradition, so that it remains to the present day the most widely flung and all-pervasive legal tradition, challenged only by the economic competitiveness of the AngloAmerican Common law. The maintenance of critical scholarly study of the roots and consequences of the tradition would scarcely need justification in an age more imaginative and less materialistic than our own. Those who have contributed to this volume hope thereby to have furthered each in his way the exposition of the Roman Law Tradition so fruitfully explored by its dedicatee. 13

For the former of these maxims, see Daan Asser, 'Audi et Alteram Partem: A Limit to Judicial Activity', below, pp. 209-23.

Labeo and the fraudulent slave Alan Rodger

'Every age should be the mistress of its own law.'1 Altmeister Maitland learned this lesson from Germany, and Peter Stein, who has illuminated the history of legal developments in many lands and at different periods, has passed that same lesson on to us.2 The message from Cambridge is surely correct - provided, of course, the new mistress does not too readily believe that in her salad days all her judgments are better than the mature reflections of her predecessors. Yet even a suitably cautious age will find that some things must simply be fashioned afresh. The assessment of damages under the lex Aquilia is an obvious example. Confronted with unacceptable penal elements and retrospective calculations, legal practitioners soon devised their own schemes, while leaving the Roman rules to be the playthings of generations of legal scholars and historians.3 Happily the playthings of Romanists do not wear out quickly, and the Roman rules are studied to this day. But when the original doctrine is discarded in this way, the texts can be particularly difficult to interpret. Since we have all been brought up in a system with different assumptions, we tend to look at the texts through spectacles which are coloured by those assumptions. Even the most conscientious legal historian willfindit hard to see a problem as the Roman jurists would have seen it. I have chosen to discuss a text on the lex Aquilia whose interpretation illustrates these problems in an acute form. D.9.2.23.4 (Ulpian, 18 ad edictum). Sed et si servus qui magnas fraudes in meis rationibus commiserat fuerit occisus, de quo quaestionem habere destinaveram, ut fraudium participes eruerentur, rectissime Labeo scribit tanti aestimandum, quanti mea intererat fraudes servi per eum commissas detegi, non quanti noxa eius servi valeat. 1 2 3

F. W. Maitland, 'The Making of the German Civil Code', in The Collected Papers of Frederic William Maitland, vol. Ill, ed. H. A. L. Fisher (Cambridge, 1911), 474, 487. P. Stein, 'Continental Influences on English Legal Thought', in The Character and Influence of the Roman Civil Law (London and Ronceverte, 1988), 209, 229. See, for example, H. Coing, Europdisches Privatrecht, vol. I (Munich, 1985), 510; R. Zimmermann, The Law of Obligations (Cape Town, Wetton and Johannesburg, 1990), 1019.

15

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On the other hand, in the case of killing a slave who had committed great embezzlements in running my affairs and whom I had resolved to examine by torture in order to drag out the names of his accomplices in dishonesty, Labeo writes very rightly that he must be valued according to my interest in detecting the frauds he had committed and not according to the value of the harm he had done.4

Scholars5 agree that the opinion of Labeo in this text is an early illustration of the process by which the measure of damages under chapter 1 was expanded beyond the value of the slave himself to include the loss suffered by the individual plaintiff as a result of the slave's death. But, if that much is agreed, modern writers remain divided about the exact scope of Labeo's decision. We begin by looking at their views. Existing interpretations

The facts stated in the text are quickly summarised. A slave who had falsified his owner's accounts was killed just when his owner was intending to have him tortured to uncover the names of his accomplices. Labeo says that in the Aquilian action the owner can recover his interest in detecting the frauds committed by the slave ('quanti mea intererat fraudes servi per eum commissas detegi') rather than what the noxa of the slave would be worth. Parts of the text are unsatisfactory. Beseler6 rightly sees that the opening words ('sed et si') are an inappropriate link with the preceding sentence - presumably a sign that material has been cut out. The most glaring defect perhaps is that 'servi' and 'per eum commissas' cannot both have occurred side by side in the original. Mommsen7 deletes 'servi' while Lenel8 removes 'per eum commissas'. Subject to what is said below,9 for our purposes it does not particularly matter which solution is adopted, since the point being made in the text would remain the same: the measure of value is related to detecting the frauds of the slave who has been killed. The last clause beginning 'non quanti' is generally regarded as very obscure. Beseler10 and others delete it. In the final section of this chapter I 4 5 6

7 8 9

C. F. Kolbert (trans.), Justinian, The Digest of Roman Law. Theft, Rapine, Damage and Insult (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), 83. For literature see Zimmermann, The Law of Obligations, 971 n. 125; D. Medicus, Id Quod Interest (Cologne and Graz, 1962), 241 n. 34; Index Interpolationum. G. Beseler, 'Romanistische Studien: Zur Sachbewertung nach dem aquilischen Recht' (1930) 50 Z.S.S. 18,25 at 27; earlier, 'Einzelne Stellen' (1922) 43 Z.S.S. 535, 540. M. Kaser, Quanti Ea Res Est (Munich, 1935), 174 n. 26 follows Beseler's later, more radical, attack. P. Voci, Risarcimento e pena privata nel diritto romano classico (Milan, 1939), 72 drily observes that the text does not have the defects which Beseler and Kaser wish to find in it. Stereotype Digest, ad loc. O. Lenel, Palingenesia Iuris Civilis, vol. II (Leipzig, 1889), 526 n. 1. 10 Text accompaning n. 45. 50 Z.S.S. 27.

Labeo and the fraudulent slave

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hope to show that it is substantially genuine, but for the moment we can concentrate on the previous clause, which gives us the measure of damages which Labeo adopted. The facts of the problem as set out in the text refer to the plaintiff's intention to torture the slave in order to discover the identity of his accomplices. So scholars tend to treat the text as though Labeo must have directed his assessment of damages to that possibility. In other words they treat the text as if Labeo assessed the plaintiff's damages by reference to what the plaintiff might have found out if the slave had not been killed and he had been able to question him. For instance, Professor Ankum says that according to Labeo the defendant must pay the plaintiff's interest 'a ce que soient decouvertes au moyen de lui les fraudes de mon esclave (et de ses complices)'.11 It is sufficient to notice that under cover of brackets Ankum has smuggled in a reference to the slave's accomplices, who do not appear in the Latin text. Medicus,12 who would like to interpret the text in a similar fashion, presumably sees the difficulty of straining the meaning of the Latin in this way and simply says that this part of the text is not in order. In other words he says that the original classical decision has been obscured, perhaps by being abridged. Beseler eventually concluded that the discussion in the text is probably almost completely spurious, since, by including an element of value peculiar to the plaintiff, it did not conform to his theory that under chapter 1 a plaintiff could recover only the highest value which the slave would have had for any owner in the last year.13 Beseler's general thesis has not found favour, and his radical approach to this text has not been followed.14 Instead, later writers have rightly pointed out that the text gives us at best a truncated version of the original discussion in which the differing views of various jurists would have been canvassed. Perhaps because he feels that the opinion attributed to Labeo would have been too radical for a jurist of his time, Medicus15 suggests that in the original text he may have held the opposite opinion. Even although such false attributions are known to occur, there seems little reason to follow the approach of Medicus. The underlying reason why modern scholars are uneasy with the text is that the plaintiff's claim for damages appears to run up against a difficulty which has puzzled lawyers since the time of the glossators. The plaintiff was about to have the slave tortured in order to discover the 11 12 14 15

H. Ankum, 'UActio depauperie et Yactio legis Aquiliae dans le droit romain classique', in Studi in onore di Cesare Sanfilippo, vol. II (Milan, 1982), 11, 49 n. 82. 13 Id Quod Interest, 241 n. 36. 50 Z.S.S. 27. See, for example, Th. J. Gerke, 'Geschichtliche Entwicklung der Bemessung der Anspruche aus der "Lex Aquilia'" (1957) 23 S.D.H.I. 61. Id Quod Interest, 242.

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names of his accomplices. He would then, it is assumed, have sued the accomplices or, if they too were slaves, their owners in some kind of action to recover what he had lost because of their fraud. So in the Aquilian action he would sue for a sum representing what he might have been able to recover in those actions. Now even if you approach the problem in this way and even if you assume that the plaintiff knows the sum which he lost through the fraud, his claim seems to face an insuperable objection. In order to demonstrate his loss from the death of his slave, the plaintiff would have to show what names the torture would have revealed and so what actions he would have brought and what damages he would have won. But if he could prove this in an Aquilian action, then equally he could prove the same matters in proceedings against the accomplices or their owners, and so he should still be able to sue them for the frauds in spite of his slave being killed. On that basis he has lost nothing, and should be able to recover nothing, under this head. Yet, it is said, Labeo awards the plaintiff damages for loss. This insoluble riddle confronts any scholar who maintains that Labeo favoured awarding damages to the plaintiff on the basis of his lost opportunity to sue the accomplices. But Beseler,16 who realises that the text does not actually say this, states the position accurately when he says that the 'problem posed' in the text (Problemstellung) contains what he regards as a vicious circle. He rightly does not suggest that the vicious circle is found in Labeo's answer. What Labeo's answer actually says is that Labeo measured the plaintiff's recovery by reference to what it was worth to him to have the slave's frauds detected. That is to say, Labeo looked to the discovery of the frauds of the dead slave and not to any discoveries about the accomplices. Moreover, despite what Medicus and the others say, Labeo does not even mention the sum of which the plaintiff has been defrauded. His reasoning is quite different. Of course, Beseler thinks the reasoning is nonsense, but this does not matter for now. The important thing is that it is the problem and not Labeo's answer which seems to give rise to the logical impasse. As we shall see in due course, Labeo's answer is really directed at a slightly different point. It is none the less useful to look more closely at the route by which modern scholars try to escape from their self-imposed logical dilemma. We may take Medicus' treatment as typical since it has found favour with subsequent writers. Medicus says17 - perhaps correctly, perhaps incorrectly - that we can assume that the plaintiff knew how much he had lost through the frauds. What he did not know was the identity of his slave's accomplices. Had he been able to find this out, the argument runs, he 16

50 Z.S.S. 27.

17

Id Quod Interest, 241.

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19

would have been able to sue the accomplices and recover his loss - in an actiofurti according to Wolff,18 in an actio doli according to Ankum.19 Of course, for various reasons the plaintiff might not have discovered any accomplices. For instance, the slave might not have spoken up under torture - older writers get round this difficulty by saying that in the light of experience with torture the jurist assumed that the slave would not have been able to withstand the pain of the rack.20 Even if the slave had named an accomplice, the accomplice might have been another of the slaves of the plaintiff himself or he might not have been worth suing. One can easily devise circumstances in which the plaintiff would have lost nothing under this head through the death of his slave. But, says Medicus, Labeo or Ulpian argued that the defendant should not be able to take advantage of any difficulty which such arguments posed for the plaintiff in establishing his loss, precisely because that very difficulty was caused by the defendant's wrongful act. So, on this view, the jurist allows the plaintiff to recover his loss from the frauds even though he cannot actually prove that by killing the slave the defendant deprived him of any real prospect of recovering that loss from anyone else. Not surprisingly, perhaps, Ankum21 characterises this supposed approach of Labeo as 'audacious'. At all events it is difficult to accept, not least because, as we have seen, it does not fit at all with the wording of the text, especially on the measure of recovery. But in substance also this interpretation is very problematic. Its proponents are really saying that Labeo swept aside the usual requirements and allowed the plaintiff to recover a loss which he could not prove. Of course, as a legal innovator22 Labeo might have suspended all the usual rules, but there is no sign of anything similar in other damages texts. Value and loss

None of the solutions proposed up till now is satisfactory,23 and in fact the text has been misinterpreted. To understand it we must recall the basic 18 19 20 21 22 23

H. J. Wolff, Beitrdge zur Rechtsgeschichte Altgriechenlands und des hellenistischromischen Aegypten (Weimar, 1962), 276 n. 7 (1936). Studi Sanfilippo, vol. II, 49-50. For example, A. Pernice, Zur Lehre von der Sachbeschadigungen nach romischem Rechte (Weimar, 1867), 242-3. Studi Sanfilippo, vol. II, 50 n. 85. D . 1.2.2.47 (Pomponius, Liber Singulars Enchiridii). C. H. Monro, Digest IX.2 Lex Aquilia (Cambridge, 1928), 28 argues that 'perhaps' the defendant deliberately kills the slave to prevent him revealing his accomplices. Unfortunately there is not a hint of that in the text. Cf. J. B. Thayer, Lex Aquilia, On Gifts between Husband and Wife (Cambridge, M A , 1929), 8 0 - 1 .

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facts about a plaintiffs claim under chapter I.24 In Institutes 3.212 Gaius tells us that in an action under chapter 1 you do not only estimate the worth of the corpus, but you also take into account the additional loss which the owner suffers through the death of the slave. The loss caused by the death is therefore regarded as separate from the value of the slave. As one of his examples of this separate loss Gaius mentions the owner whose slave has been instituted heir under someone's will but is killed before he enters the estate. The owner loses the estate and can recover not only the value of the slave but in addition this loss which has been caused by the slave being killed. Justinian explains that the inclusion of such losses was due to the interpretation of the jurists rather than to the wording of the statute itself.25 Gaius does not mention the calculation of the highest value of the slave ('quanti in eo anno plurimi ea res fuit') until Institutes 3.214. It is this calculation, rather than the assessment of loss, which is sometimes said to lead to the owner recovering more than the slave was worth at the time of his death. This is still reflected in the treatment in Justinian's Institutes.26 So a plaintiff's claim may comprise two elements: the highest value of the slave in the previous year and the loss which the owner suffers as a result of the slave being killed. As long as the notion of value is confined to the market value of the slave, the two ideas are obviously very different. But if the idea of value is widened so as to include value to the plaintiff himself, rather than simply market value, the line between them becomes blurred. In particular both the idea of the value of the slave to the actual plaintiff and the idea of the loss caused to the actual plaintiff by the killing of his slave will tend to be thought of as the interest of the plaintiff in not having his slave killed. Yet, as his Institutes show, the two elements in fact remained distinct even in the time of Justinian. The reason must have been that, whereas you could recover the highest value of the slave in the last year, even if you had not actually lost all of that value, you could recover only those consequential losses which you had actually suffered. So it would matter into which category any element was placed. If, for instance, the jurists had said that an inheritance formed part of the value of a slave, then the slave's owner would have been entitled to recover the value of the slave, including the value of the inheritance, even if the owner had not actually lost the inheritance.27 But, as we saw, Gaius 3.212 makes it plain that an inheritance was not included in the slave's value and the plaintiff could claim for the loss of the inheritance only if he had actually lost it because of the slave being killed. 24 25

Gerke, 23 S.D.H.I. 61 contains a very full citation and discussion of the literature on the matter. 26 27 J.Inst. 4.3.10. J.Inst. 4.3.9. Cf. Beseler, 50 Z.S.S. 25f.

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If we now return to 23.4 we find that it is the remains of part of Ulpian's commentary on what elements made up the highest value of a slave for this purpose. The context of the text in the Digest, to which we now turn, makes this clear. The context

The principal objection to all the existing interpretations of the text is that they really ignore its context in the Digest. Of course, Wolff28 remarks that the paragraph comes in the middle of decisions which are based on something other than the pure value of the object, and Zimmermann29 says that 23.4 shows the practical consequences of adopting the principle stated by Ulpian in 21.2: 'hoc iure utimur, ut eius quod interest fiat aestimatio'. But while that may be the wider setting of our passage, the immediate context is much more narrowly drawn. H.t. 23.4 comes from a group of texts which deal in some detail with the provision in chapter 1 that the plaintiff is entitled to recover the slave's highest value in the last year.30 The discussion begins at 23.3 with a statement of the rule, apparently culled from Julian. Beseler31 rightly remarks that we hardly need Julian to tell us the rule since it is in the statute, but this reference may have been part of Julian's reasoning for the decision in the example of a valuable slave artist whose thumb had been cut off at some time during the year before he was killed. His owner recovers the slave's highest value - his value before his thumb was cut off. Then follows our text, which is in its turn followed in 23.5 by the case of a slave who became vicious during the year before his death - the plaintiff recovers the value of the slave before his character changed for the worse. Finally in 23.6 we are told that all the advantages which made the slave more valuable during the year are to be added to his value. Even if we allow for the possibility of some interpolation,32 the general position seems to be clear. Our text occurs in a section of commentary where Ulpian is writing about cases in which the value of the slave is to be calculated by reference to a particular time during the preceding year when he had a higher value than at other times. Our text must raise the same kind of issue. It is astonishing to notice just how consistently this aspect of 23.4 has been ignored by writers. Going back no further than Voet, we find that, 28 30

31

29 Beitrage, 276 n. 7. The Law of Obligations, 971-2. A . Rodger, 'Damages for the Loss of an Inheritance', in Daube Noster, ed. W. A. J. Watson (Edinburgh and London, 1974), 289,297 n. 40 at 299. Some of the conclusions in that essay need to be revised. 32 50 Z.S.S. 27. Index Interpolationum and Supplementum, adhos locos.

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when he states the rule that the value was to be calculated by reference to the highest value in the last year, he refers to 23.3, 23.5 and 23.6, but jumps over 23.4 in silence.33 We find exactly the same phenomenon in Windscheid,34 and more recently, for instance, in Jolowicz35 and Lawson.36 None of the writers try to explain why 23.4 occurs at this point if they are interpreting it correctly and if, as they seem to think, it has nothing to do with the subject-matter of the surrounding texts. Only Beseler's radical view37 that 23.4 is a marginal gloss could even begin to account for the phenomenon of the text occurring here, and even he would have to explain why the gloss was written at this point in the first place. The exact place of 23.4 in this stretch of Ulpian's commentary is therefore the single most important clue to its proper interpretation and it points to the fact that the text concerns the assessment of the highest value of the slave in the past year. In h.t. 23.3-23.6 all Ulpian's remarks are directed specifically at the calculation of the highest value of the slave. He mentions factors in the slave himself which affect his value. So in 23.3 the value of a slave who is an artist is increased by this talent which he possesses, but apparently assessing that value would not always be straightforward. Presumably, some other skills at least, for example musical ability, would have been thought to increase a slave's value. In 23.5 Ulpian mentions a slave of good character who becomes vicious. The slave's character affects his value, but again complications are being envisaged. When we look at 23.4 in the context of these texts, we see that here also Ulpian is considering whether the plaintiff should be entitled to recover an element in the slave's value which would have been of value to his owner. The element in question is the information which he possessed. That is the real significance of the text, and it has been somewhat overlooked by scholars who have concentrated instead on the supposed illogicality of Labeo's decision. Certain forms of knowledge must frequently have been relevant to a slave's value. The talent of an artist will often be a combination of skill and knowledge which he has been taught. The slave who teaches Greek 33 34 35

36

37

J. Voet, Commentarius ad Pandectas (Lugduni Batavorum, 1698), 9.2.4. B. Windscheid, Lehrbuch des Pandektenrechts, 9th edn by Th. Kipp (Frankfurt-on-Main, 1906), vol. II, 455 n. 20. H. F. Jolowicz, T h e Original Scope of the Lex Aquilia and the Question of Damages' (1922) 38 L.Q.R. 220, 227-8. The article as a whole had the misfortune to suffer the honour of a magisterial review by Lenel: (1922) 43 Z.S.S. 575. F. H. Lawson, Negligence in the Civil Law (Oxford, 1950), 59 n. 2 and 140, note to Gaius 3.214; F. Lawson and B. Markesinis, Tortious Liability for Unintentional Harm in the Common Law and the Civil Law, vol. I (Cambridge, 1982), 4 n. 25 at 189 and 35 n. 244 at 197. See in particular Ankum, Studi Sanfilippo, vol. II, 47f.

Labeo and the fraudulent slave

23

will be valued for his knowledge of the language as well as for any skill he has in imparting it to his pupils. The doctor will be valued for his medical knowledge as well as for his skill in tending his patients. H.t. 23.4 takes the argument a significant step further, since in these other cases the slave's knowledge would be of use to any purchaser and so would be reflected in his value on the market. Here, on the other hand, Ulpian is discussing the slave's knowledge of his accomplices in a fraud - knowledge which would be of use, and hence of value, only to his owner who had been defrauded. The extent to which such personal elements should be allowed in calculating the value of a slave under chapter 1 seems to have been the subject of discussion among the jurists. While in h.t. 33 pr. (Paul, 2 ad Plautium) Paul quotes an opinion from Sextus Pedius, who seems to have held that nothing other than the ordinary value of any object should be recovered, that narrow view of Sextus Pedius did not go unchallenged, since in h.t. 22pr. (Paul, 22 adedictum) and h.t. 55 (Paul, 22 quaestionum) wefindindications that the judge should take account of the value of a slave to the individual plaintiff. H.t. 23.4 is simply another facet of that general discussion, and Ulpian is concerned with the problem of the value of knowledge which the slave possessed and which would be of interest principally at least to his owner. Since the idea that a slave's value could be increased by this kind of knowledge may seem strange at first sight, it is worth noting that, even on the existing interpretation of the text, scholars like Medicus contemplate that a claim could lie for knowledge which the slave had, since they argue that the plaintiff can recover for the loss which he suffers through not being able to extract that knowledge by torturing the slave. But the context indicates that Ulpian regarded the slave's knowledge of the events surrounding the frauds as having a possible bearing on the value of the slave himself; he did not treat the loss of that knowledge as a separate loss which the plaintiff suffered as a result of the death of the slave. We must therefore follow Ulpian and consider whether any part of the slave's knowledge of the frauds could be said to increase his value to his owner. Information about accomplices

When we say that under chapter 1 the plaintiff is entitled to recover the highest value of his slave in the last year,38 we mean that in practice in an action a plaintiff will try to establish what the highest value of his slave was during that time. When he does this, as is shown by the example of the artist whose thumb had been cut off, the plaintiff will not necessarily be 38

50 Z.S.S. 27.

24

Alan Rodger

saying that he lost all of that highest value. So in this respect he will not be trying to establish his ioss' in the same way as a plaintiff would in a modern system. Once he has established the highest value, the plaintiff can point to the terms of chapter 1 and say that he should be awarded that amount - plus any loss which he has suffered through his slave being killed. He will, moreover, resist any suggestion that he should recover less than the slave's highest value, simply because he has actually lost rather less. We saw above that 23.4 deals with the highest value of the slave. It follows that it concerns an owner who would have been trying to establish his highest value in the last year; he would not have been trying to establish what he had lost through his slave being killed. The owner would therefore have argued that immediately before his death the slave was particularly valuable to him, because under torture he would have revealed the name of his accomplices and the owner could have obtained some recompense from them. Put shortly, the plaintiff was arguing that the value of the slave was increased because of certain knowledge which he had. In one way the owner was on strong ground: just before the slave was killed, his owner would indeed have thought that his value was increased because of this factor and might well have acted on that assumption. So, for instance, if someone had offered to buy the slave for the going rate in the market, his owner would presumably have refused to sell him, on the basis that he wanted to discover who had been his accomplices in the fraud. If the slave had lived long enough to be tortured, then the owner's belief that he was more valuable on this account might well have been proved correct. But in fact, precisely because he was killed, with the benefit of hindsight we can see that the owner was wrong. The slave was worth nothing more to his owner on account of any knowledge which he had about his accomplices, since he took that knowledge with him to the grave without revealing it. The importance of the distinction can be seen if we change the facts of the case a little. Suppose that the slave had indeed been tortured and had revealed accomplices from whom his owner had then got back some of the proceeds of the fraud. Within the next twelve months the slave is killed and his owner brings an action under chapter 1. In this case also the plaintiff would have argued that during the last year the highest value of his slave included the value of his knowledge of his accomplices. But on these facts the plaintiff could establish that this knowledge had actually made the slave more valuable to him at one stage by pointing to the sum which he received from the accomplices as a result of torturing the slave. If we think only in terms of the highest value of the slave, then it seems that in this

Labeo and the fraudulent slave

25

example the plaintiff would have succeeded in his claim. The difference between the cases is that in this example the slave was indeed more valuable to the plaintiff because of his knowledge, whereas in h.t. 23.4, although his owner could not see this at the time, the slave was not in fact more valuable, because he was going to be killed before anyone could find out what he knew. In assessing the slave's highest value, the judge looks back, perhaps from the time of his decision, but at least from the moment when the slave has been killed, and uses hindsight to determine what the value of the slave was at any particular period, in the light of events which have occurred since that time. This is what Ulpian means when he tells us of the slave in 23.2 that 'retrorsum quanti plurimi fuit inspicitur'. 39 This second example is also useful in highlighting the difference between an approach based on the highest value of the slave in the last year and our modern concept of damages as compensation for loss. We have difficulty in accepting that under the lex Aquilia the slave's owner could claim a sum which includes money which he has already obtained from the slave's accomplices. Yet if you once concede that the slave's value can include his value as a source of information, the rest follows: that will be the slave's highest value and the plaintiff can claim that value under chapter 1. To avoid that result, you would need to invoke a further principle, viz. that the plaintiff must make allowances for any element in the value which he has not actually lost. In other words you would have to adopt an approach which had moved away from concentrating on the highest value of the slave to the plaintiff and towards focusing on what loss the plaintiff had suffered as a result of the death of the slave. But the two approaches are very different and, while the jurists may have moved towards an actual assessment of loss, that development appears to have been a slow and uneven process, especially in chapter 1 cases.40 It has often been pointed out 41 that there is no general statement in the sources that the highest value was to be reduced; and the general view among scholars is that no reductions were made under chapter 1,42 In other words once the judge determined what the highest value to the particular plaintiff was, that sum should be awarded. Indeed we know from Gaius and elsewhere that from time to time a plaintiff would receive more than he had actually lost. 43 Awarding the plaintiff an amount which 39 40 41 42 43

See Rodger, Daube Noster, 297. I would n o w argue more strongly that the clause is classical. D . D a u b e , ' O n the Use of the T e r m Damnwri, in Collected Studies in Roman Law, vol. I, ed. D . C o h e n a n d D . Simon (Frankfurt-on-Main, 1991), 279, 328. Beseler by contrast simply assumes the existence of such a principle introduced apparently by juristic interpretation: 50 Z.S.S. 26. F o r example Kaser, Quanti Ea Res Est, 176f.; Medicus, Id Quod Interest, 243f. G a i u s 3.214; J.Inst. 4.3.9. a n d 4.6.19.

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included the value of sums which he had already recovered would simply be a more extreme example of the anomalies which could arise. The anomalies are perhaps more disturbing to us today than they would have been to Roman jurists, for whom the penal element in delictual actions was not at all strange. If we now go back to h.t. 23.4, we are in a better position to appreciate the kind of discussion which would have occurred at this point. It seems likely that Ulpian would have mentioned a case similar to that of the slave who had been killed after he had revealed the names of his accomplices. Ulpian may well have reported the views of jurists who thought that in such circumstances the plaintiff was entitled to claim a value for his slave which included the value of the information given by the slave even though this might mean that the plaintiff was over-compensated. Equally there may have been others who felt that by their time the notion of interesse had developed to such an extent that the plaintiff should not be allowed to claim the value of the knowledge if indeed he had actually lost less than that sum. As a refinement on that case Ulpian would have introduced the problem which is narrated in 23.4, where the slave is killed before he can be tortured. Here again the plaintiff would have argued that the highest value of the slave included something for the value of his knowledge. The defendant would presumably have replied that on these facts he should not have to pay anything for this element. Again there may have been discussion among the jurists about what the correct approach should be, but it seems likely that the predominant view would have been against the plaintiff. Looking at the matter in retrospect, the judge should reject the argument that the value to the plaintiff of his slave had been increased by the slave's knowledge about his accomplices, since in fact as a result of his death that knowledge had proved to be of no value to the plaintiff. Information about the slave's frauds

But even though the piece of text which is now h.t. 23.4 may have formed part of such a discussion, it is equally certain that Labeo's answer as recorded is not formulated in any of the ways which we have just outlined. We must therefore explore the matter a little further. Unfortunately the facts of the case are not stated very clearly. For instance, the text does not tell us when the frauds were committed or when they were discovered. The date of the frauds is probably not important, but the date when they were discovered is significant. Even though the text is silent, it gives the impression at least that the frauds had been detected not long before the slave's death. After all, the plaintiff had been about to try to discover who

Labeo and the fraudulent slave

27

else had been involved, and it would be surprising if he had left that inquiry for over a year after his original discovery. We are doing no great violence to the text if we assume that the frauds had been detected within the year preceding the slave's death. In assessing the value of the slave, Labeo attached importance to the discovery that he had committed frauds. Indeed, to judge from the text, he linked the measure of recovery to it: 'quanti mea intererat fraudes servi per eum commissas detegi'. We can therefore proceed on the basis that Labeo is somehow or other prepared to increase the value of the slave by a sum representing the plaintiff's interest in detecting his frauds. Since both the slave's role in the frauds and the frauds themselves had already been discovered before his death, an assessment of the slave's value based on the discovery of those frauds would refer back to an earlier point in the year. At first sight it seems perverse to suggest that the discovery of the frauds could somehow or other increase the slave's value. After all, in reality, the discovery that a slave had been falsifying his master's accounts would immediately reduce his market value. If, for instance, his owner wished to sell the slave, he would need to tell prospective purchasers what the slave had done. 44 This would make him less attractive and so lower his price. But that factor would not necessarily matter in a claim for damages for the slave's death. Under chapter 1 any such reduction in the slave's value might have been disregarded if he were killed within a year, since his owner was entitled to recover the slave's highest value, i.e. his value before the frauds were uncovered. But even here we must be cautious, since, if the frauds had occurred some time before, the defendant could well argue to some effect that uncovering them simply showed that the slave had been a crook and as such worthless throughout the year. None the less the jurists would still have to decide whether the discovery of the frauds pointed to some other element which should be included in the slave's value. The only guide to Labeo's decision can be what the text actually says, and since it links the value of the slave and the discovery of the frauds, we may not be too rash if we assume that Labeo's reasoning must also have been based on a link between the slave and the discovery of the frauds. Especially in the light of the discussion in the previous section of this chapter, the most obvious link would be that the slave was somehow or other responsible for the frauds being discovered. This link does not actually appear in the text itself, although some scholars, for example Ankum, 45 might be prepared to interpret 'per eum' and 'detegi' together 44 45

See O. Lenel, Das Edictum Perpetuum, 3rd edn (Leipzig, 1927), 555. Studi Sanfilippo, vol. II, 49f., especially at n. 82.

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so as to make it say that the frauds were uncovered through the slave. This is to strain the existing text but it is conceivable that the rather unsatisfactory Latin at this point ('servi per eum commissas') has come about because of the compilers abbreviating an original in which Ulpian had explained that the plaintiff discovered the frauds through the slave. Most obviously the frauds might have come to light because the slave decided to confess - though in that event he might have been expected to reveal who his accomplices had been. Or else some act of the slave might have alerted his owner, and then, whether under torture or not, he admitted what he had done. We can therefore usefully identify three factual situations, although elements of more than one could be combined in a particular problem: Case 1 A slave is killed just when his owner is about to torture him to try to discover who his accomplices were in a fraud. Case 2 A slave is killed after he has been tortured and has told his owner who his accomplices were in a fraud. Case 3 A slave is killed after he has told his owner that he had been committing fraud on his owner. It is suggested that in 23.4 Labeo was asked to consider a problem of the following kind. During the year before a slave was killed, his owner had discovered through him that he had committed various frauds and, just before he was killed, the owner was intending to torture him to find out who his accomplices had been. What was the value of the slave to the plaintiff for the purposes of chapter 1? The problem is a combination of case 3 and case 1. For the reasons given in the previous section, on the case 1 point Labeo would have held that the slave's value was not increased by the slave's knowledge about his accomplices. But in answering the question Labeo made an additional point. He observed - and we can probably assume that he was the first to do so46 - that at one stage the slave's value to the plaintiff had in fact been increased by his knowledge of his own frauds and that the plaintiff was therefore entitled to recover, as part of the slave's value, what it was worth to him to discover those frauds. Labeo's decision is really based on the same principle as the decision in case 2, where the slave had in fact been tortured and had revealed the names of the accomplices. Just as in that case at one stage the value of the slave to his owner included the value of the information which he revealed about his accomplices, so here on the case 3 point Labeo saw that at one 46

To this extent correctly: A. A. Schiller, 'Trade Secrets and the Roman Law', in Studi in onore di Salvatore Riccobono, vol. IV (Palermo, 1936), 98 n. 145.

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29

stage the value of the slave to his owner had included the value of the information which he had revealed about his own frauds. The fact that in case 2 the slave has been tortured and has revealed information about his accomplices' actings whereas in case 3 he has spoken without torture and has revealed information about his own actings can make no difference to the underlying legal position - as Labeo spotted and as Ulpian or the compilers acknowledged by saying that he 'rectissime scribit'. Labeo was really saying that if the judge looked back over the year, he could see that, at any time after the slave had committed the frauds and before he revealed them, he was carrying about in his head this information which was of value to his owner. If the slave eventually revealed that information, then the judge could see that the information in the slave's head had been of value to his owner and so it had actually formed part of the slave's overall value to his owner. None the less case 3 does differ subtly from case 2, and Labeo's decision is properly regarded as breaking new ground. In case 2 the owner knows or at least correctly believes that his slave has the information; in case 3, on the other hand, the owner is not aware at the time that the slave has the information, since, of course, the existence of this information does not come to light unless the slave actually speaks about the frauds. Indeed the information forms part of his value to his owner only if the slave reveals it. So in case 3 we have a situation where at one point in the year, after the slave has committed the frauds but before he reveals them, his actual value to his owner is higher than the owner realises at the time. We can also compare this claim in case 3 with the claim in case 1 for the knowledge which the slave has, but which he does not reveal because he is killed. In case 3 the slave is in actual fact more valuable to the owner because of knowledge about the frauds which the owner does not realise the slave has until he speaks up. By contrast in case 1 the owner knows, or rightly believes, that the slave has certain knowledge and therefore considers that he is more valuable to him. But in actual fact the slave is not more valuable on this account, since he will be killed before the knowledge can be extracted from him. Doubtless a variant of case 1 may have been discussed. Suppose that the slave has committed frauds and intends to reveal them, but before he can do so, someone else tells his owner. The slave is then killed. In such a case it would seem that a judge looking back would hold that the slave's information never in fact formed any part of his value, because in the event the owner discovered the frauds from another source. A judge making a retrospective assessment of value has plenty of opportunities to indulge a taste for dramatic irony. It is also important to notice that a reference to the decision of Labeo on the case 3 point would have fitted well into this particular part of

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Ulpian's commentary. As we saw, in the segments which the compilers have selected Ulpian is mentioning cases where the slave's value for the purposes of the assessment under chapter 1 is not his value at the time he was killed but his value at some other time during the year. On Labeo's approach to case 3 the slave's value to his owner would include his knowledge about the frauds, and his role in them, only up to the moment when he revealed what had happened. Once the frauds are known to his owner, the slave's knowledge of them and of his role in them ceases to be any part of his value to his owner. It follows that, where the slave is killed after he has admitted the frauds, that knowledge does not form part of his value to his owner at the time of his death. Labeo is prepared to include the value of this information in the value of the slave, but he is careful to say that the value of the claim is the value of discovering the frauds. Again this is something which is concealed in the usual interpretation of the text, which maintains that the sum to be recovered is the sum of which the plaintiff was defrauded. Labeo's version is much less crude than this modern formulation, and, what is more important, it makes excellent sense. He realises that, if the discovery of the fraud had not led to any money or property being recovered by the plaintiff, then the discovery as such had not in fact been worth anything to the plaintiff. Suppose the slave had told the plaintiff about the frauds. The plaintiff would then have been able to investigate them and discover what he had lost. He might have found, for instance, that the slave had taken 10,000 sesterces by falsifying the accounts, In itself that discovery would not be worth anything to the plaintiff at least as far as past frauds (fraudes ... commissas) are concerned - though it might have prevented any further depredations. After all, the owner is no better off just because he has discovered that he has lost 10,000 sesterces and that the slave has spent that sum on riotous living. On the other hand the discovery would lead to a positive financial return if, for instance, the plaintiff then searched the slave's quarters and found 5,000 of the missing 10,000 sesterces hidden under his bed. Then one could say that discovering the slave's frauds had been worth 5,000 sesterces to the plaintiff. Labeo therefore thought that in such a case the slave's value included this element and the plaintiff should be allowed to recover it in the Aquilian action. This is precisely the distinction which is being made in the text if we read the account of Labeo's decision as a whole, including the part at the end of the text in the clause 4non quanti noxa eius servi valeat'. No particular criticism has been directed at the grammar or language of the clause. Scholars have just been unable to fathom what it means, because they have not understood the point which Labeo was considering. We can

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adopt the straightforward translation of Kolbert, which gives noxa its well-established meaning and treats it as referring to the wrong47 committed by the slave. Labeo is then saying that the true measure of the slave's value includes the interest of the plaintiff in uncovering the slave's delict ('quanti mea intererat fraudes servi per eum commissas detegi') rather than the value of the slave's delict itself ('non quanti noxa eius servi valeat'). In other words the plaintiff cannot simply add to the slave's value the sum which the slave took; but the plaintiff can argue that his value should include the amount which the plaintiff got back as a result of what the slave had told him. Of course, the result of giving the plaintiff even this additional amount would be that he would be rather over-compensated, since in the example given above he would already have recovered the 5,000 sesterces and would obtain a corresponding sum of 5,000 sesterces in the Aquilian action. As we saw when discussing case 2, that is not in itself a reason for thinking that Labeo could not have held this view. On the other hand such an approach to the plaintiff's claim in a delictual action has not commended itself to later ages - and this may help to explain why Labeo's view, which was so appreciated by Ulpian, has been so misunderstood and disparaged by more modern jurists.48 47 48

E. Seckel, Heumanns Handlexikon zu den Quellen des romischen Rechts, 9th edn (Jena, 1907), s.v. noxa 1. I am grateful to Professor Peter Birks and Dr David Johnston for their comments on an earlier draft. Professor Birks in particular allowed me to bombard him with letters and made time for me to come and discuss the matter with him at short notice. After this essay was in the press I received, by the courtesy of the author, G. Valditara, Superamento dell'destinatio rei nella valutazione del danno aquiliano ed estensione delta tutela ai non domini (Milan, 1992). The author's explanation of 23.4 differs from mine, but he does recognise the need to interpret the text within the context of 23.3 and 23.5. See, for example, at 170.

3

Doing and causing to be done Peter Birks

Why did both the Roman and the English law of civil wrongs adopt, and override, causal tests which were embarrassingly, even absurdly, restrictive? This paper, a token in recognition of a debt to Peter Stein, suggests an answer. Harm-verbs in the active voice drove the law into a causal corner. A system which imposes liability on a person who does (damages, injures, wounds, breaks, spills) will be forced to define doing narrowly and will have to supplement the liability for doing with another for causing to be done (be damaged, injured, wounded, broken, spilled). This effect becomes stronger as the harm-verb is tied more closely to physical damage. It is stronger for 'break' than 'harm' itself.1 Defendants will compel the law to look for the act of breaking. The image of a person doing that act cannot admit much intervention between the defendant's bodily movements and the thing broken. The seeming absurdities have nothing to do with competitions between concepts of liability different from our own, much less with the pursuit of different socio-economic goals.2 Litigation was caught up in the implications of the words in which it happened to be conducted. The modern law school, with the help of procedural reforms, is able to debate ideas detached from actional forms. When it looks at the past, it must learn to 1

German law appears to have escaped this difficulty despite the use of an active harm-verb in the dominant text, namely 823 I B.G.B.: 'A person who wilfully or negligently injures the life, body, health, freedom, property, or other right of another contrary to law is bound to compensate him for any damage arising therefrom.' The operative words in German are 'Wer ... das Leben ... eines anderen widerrechtlich verletzt'. Discussion: R. Zimmer-

mann, The Law of Obligations: Roman Foundations of the Civilian Tradition (Cape Town,

2

1990), 977, 989; B. S. Markesinis, The German Law of Torts (2nd edn, Oxford, 1990), 10, 50ff. The escape from the problem may be put down partly to luck, partly to the departure from the image of a physical act effected by the introduction of non-physical interests as the object of the verb and, in association with such abstract objects, to the non-physical range of verletzen ('injure'). For a modern version, seeking to revise others of the same kind, see David Kretzmer, Transformation of Tort Liability in the Nineteenth Century: The Visible Hand' (1984) 4 O.J.L.S. 46. For Kretzmer the present subject-matter represents a shift from liability based on the defendant's generation of a risk which the plaintiff could not avoid to a liability based on the defendant's duty to avert a loss likely to be suffered by the plaintiff.

32

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33

read the semantic constraints imposed by forms of action precisely as constraints, not as evidence of a different mind-set. However, this shortening of the chain of causation was not thrust upon the law by particular words, only by the choice of harm-verbs in the simple active voice. The Roman story in relation to killing slaves and livestock, for example, cannot be explained as turning on the choice of the word occidere; it would have worked out in the same way if the draftsman had chosen interficere or necare? So much has been written of killing that it is helpful to concentrate on something different. This paper chooses burning. This is only a matter of focus. 'Burning' represents all active harm-verbs, and 'causing to be burned' exemplifies all bringing about of damage. The first section below sets the scene; the second seeks to explain it. Burning and causing to be burned

It is convenient to have a recurrent point of reference. The events of Hughes v. Lord Advocate4 suit well. Post Office workers had left lighted paraffin lamps to mark an open manhole down which they had been working. The manhole remained open, covered by a small tent. Two young boys, the pursuer and his friend, began to play with the lamps. The pursuer entered the tent and let one of the lamps drop down the hole. The paraffin vaporised and exploded. The pursuer was horribly burned. On these facts a liability based on the proposition that the workmen burned the boy could never have attached. The pursuer was indeed burned, but the question was whether that consequence could be attributed to the defenders at all: could it be said that they had caused him to be burned? The freak explosion was not foreseeable. That children would play with the lamps and burn themselves was foreseeable. The Post Office was held liable. In the words of Lord Pearce: 'When an accident is of a different type and kind from anything that a defender could have foreseen he is not liable for it. But to demand too great precision in the test of foreseeability would be unfair to the pursuer since the facets of misadventure are innumerable.' 5 In Roman law the Hughes facts would have fallen within the delict of wrongful loss, dominated by the lex Aquilia, but they would have had to 3 4 5

The meanings of these words are further discussed below, nn. 57-9 and text thereto. [1963] A.C. 837. Ibid., at 857. Contrast Doughty v. Turner Manufacturing Co. Ltd. [1964] 1 Q.B. 518 (explosion in boiling liquid qualitatively different from splash); Tremaine v. Pike [1969] 3 All E.R. 1303 (Weil's disease through rat's urine qualitatively different from other rat contamination).

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be litigated through an actio infactum, not through the statutory action.6 This would have been true even against the immediate wrongdoers, the negligent workmen. There are two reasons. First, the statutory action lay only to an owner who had suffered loss from wrongful damage to a thing owned. The young pursuer who was burned was not owned, nor did he own his limbs.7 For our present purposes, this is not interesting and no more will be said about it. Secondly, the direct action lay only where the injury or damage, here the burning, had been inflicted by bodily force (corpore).8 These negligent workers had left behind the lighted lamps. The injury arose because the pursuer himself dropped one down the manhole, so that it broke and exploded. The workers had not, by any stretch of the imagination, burned the pursuer by the application of bodily force. They had not shoved torches in his face or thrown burning coals at him. Nor had they even set fire to the place in which the pursuer was.9 In the eighteenth century the action of trespass was very similarly restricted. It could only be brought for direct or immediate damage. For injuries and damage brought about indirectly the victim had to have recourse to an action on the case, not for burning but for causing to be burned: why had he 'so negligently and improvidently kept his fire that (the house had been burned down)'?10 The choice between the general action and the action on the case was often difficult. In Scott v. Shepherd,11 the plaintiff had lost the sight of one eye when a firework exploded in his face. He brought an action of trespass, not case, against the defendant, who had tossed the lighted squib into a crowded place. This divided the judges. It is useful to have in full the special case subject to which the verdict was given: 6

7

8 9

10

The action under the lex is properly known as the actio directa; in order to reduce confusion in a context in which it is necessary to use 'direct' of causation it will be referred to throughout this chapter as the 'statutory' action. Roland Wittmann, Die Korperverletzung an Freien im klassischen romischen Recht (Munich, 1972), 43-6 and, on D.9.2.13 pr. (Ulpian, 18 ad edictum\ 76-82. It is of no materiality to this paper to decide whether the supplementary action on the case apparently given by Ulpian to a free man sui iuris in respect of injuries to himself is classical or (which seems unlikely) a Justinianic interpolation. Transplants and other scientific developments now put nemo dominus membrorum suorum in doubt: P. Matthews, 'Whose Body? People as Property' (1983) 36 C.L.P. 193; further: I. Kennedy and A. Grubb, Medical Law: Text and Materials (London, 1989), 1000-22. It is only Gaius, followed by Justinian's Institutes, who uses the generalised corpore test: see G.3.219 (cf. J.Inst. 4.3.16, and nn. 48 and 49 below, with text thereto). D.9.2.27.6-8 (Ulpian, 18 adedictum). Cf. Coll. 12.7. In D.9.2.30.3 (Paul, 22 adedictum) it seems certain that Paul's comments must be directed only to the fault element of the defendant's liability; he did not mean that a direct action could lie for a wind-driven fire in the countryside. See below, example in text to n. 68. » (1773) 2 W.B1. 892.

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35

On the evening of the fair-day at Milborne Port, October 28, 1770, the defendant threw a lighted squib, made of gunpowder, etc., from the street into the markethouse, which is a covered building supported by arches and enclosed at one end, but open at the other and both the sides, where a large concourse of people were assembled; which lighted squib, so thrown by the defendant, fell upon the standing of one Yates, who sold gingerbread, etc. That one Willis instantly, and to prevent injury to himself and the said wares of the said Yates, took up the said lighted squib from off of the said standing and then threw it across the said market-house, where it fell upon another standing there of one Ryal, who sold the same sort of wares, who, instantly, to save his own goods from being injured, took up the said lighted squib from off the said standing, and then threw it to another part of the said market-house, and in so throwing it struck the plaintiff, then in the said market-house, in the face therewith, and, the combustible matter then bursting, put out one of the plaintiff's eyes. No classical Roman jurist would have persuaded himself that the injury to the plaintiff's eye had been done by the bodily force of the defendant. The plaintiff would indubitably have been driven to an actio in factum. Blackstone, J. thought the same for English law. He held that the plaintiff's action of trespass must fail. He should have brought an action on the case. 'He took the settled distinction to be that, where the injury is immediate, an action of trespass will lie; where it is only consequential, it must be an action on the case.'12 Applying this, he concluded: The original act was as against Yates a trespass; not as against Ryal or Scott. The tortious act was complete when the squib lay at rest upon Yates's stall ... But Shepherd, I think, is not answerable in an action of trespass and assault for the mischief done by the squib in the new motion impressed upon it and the new direction given it by either Willis or Ryal, who both were free agents and acted upon their own judgment... Here the instrument of mischief was at rest till a new impetus and a new direction were given to it, not once only, but by two successive rational agents ... I give no opinion whether Case would lie against Shepherd for the consequential damage, though, as at present advised, I think upon the circumstances that it would. But I think that in strictness of law, Trespass would lie against Ryal, the immediate actor in this unhappy business. Both he and Willis have exceeded the bounds of self-defence and not used sufficient circumspection in removing the danger from themselves.13 12 13

(1773)2W.B1. 892, 894. Ibid., 895-6. As one might expect, the doctrine of this passage closely follows what Blackstone had already said in the Commentaries. See 3 Commentaries (Oxford, 1768), 122-3 and 208. Roman law, especially J.Inst. 4.3, is here clearly very near the surface, though his only explicit citation is of 4.3.6-7, which is about fault, not causation. For 'the settled distinction' the Commentaries cite 11 Mod. 180 (Bourden v. Alloway (1708), in which Bain, arg., attempting to drive the plaintiff from case to trespass, said, apparently with the approval in principle of the court, 'The true difference is this; Trespass is where there is an immediate injury; Case, where the injury is collateral') and Lord Raym. 1402 with Stra. 635 (the famous statements of Raymond, C. J. and Fortescue, J. in Reynolds v. Clarke (1725)).

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However, Blackstone, J. found himself in a minority of one. Though we dare to assert that no Roman jurist could have aligned himself with them, the majority judgments serve as a reminder that among all lawyers, Roman or English, a test based on words such as 'immediacy' or 'directness' or 'bodily force' will inevitably have elicited disagreements, especially when the merits pulled strongly in one direction. Thus, De Grey, C. J. expressly said, 'I agree with my Brother Blackstone as to the principles he has laid down, but not in his application of those principles to the present case.'14 And he went on to say that in his view the injury was the immediate product of the force set in motion by Shepherd: I look on all that was done subsequent to the original throwing as a continuation of the first force and first act, which will continue till the squib was spent by bursting . . . The new direction and new force flow out of the first force, and are not a new trespass . . . It has been urged that the intervention of a free agent will make a difference: but I do not consider Willis and Ryal as free agents in the present case, but acting under a compulsive necessity for their own safety and self-preservation. l5

Plaintiffs were put in real difficulty by the need to bring the correct form of action. By natural reason causing to be burned includes burning. An action on the case might therefore be thought to lie on all facts. There was, however, a routine obstacle to that simple solution. It consisted in the subsidiarity of actions on the case. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the structure and stability of the Common law were thought to require that the first-generation general actions be given primacy, so that an action on the case was excluded if a general action lay. This doctrine had largely been given up well before the eighteenth century,16 but it mustered a late burst of energy in relation to trespass. Natural reason was ultimately allowed to prevail. In Williams v. Holland in 1833 it was held that a plaintiff could bring an action on the case even if the injury had been inflicted directly, so that trespass was also available:17 'where the injury is occasioned by the carelessness and negligence of the defendant, the plaintiff is at liberty to bring an action on the case, notwithstanding 14 16

17

15 Ibid., 899. Ibid., 899-900. S. F. C. Milsom, Historical Foundations of the Common Law (2nd edn, London, 1981), 339-50, 366-79, 392-400; J. H. Baker, Introduction to English Legal History (3rd edn, London, 1990), 389-95, 413-19, 445-51, 480-3. Landmark cases: Case/Debt, Slade v. Morley (1602) 4 Co.Rep. 92 and [1971] C.L.J. 51, on which see D. Ibbetson, 'Sixteenth Century Contract Law: Slade's Case in Context' (1984) 4 O.J.L.S. 294; Case/Detinue: Eason v. Newman (1596) Cro.Eliz. 495, hack v. Clarke (1614) 1 Rolle Rep. 126; Case/Nuisance: Cantrelv. Churche (1601) Cro.Eliz. 845. (1833) 10 Bing. 112. In the judgment Tindal, C. J. justly says the work had been done eight years earlier in Moreton v. Hordern (1825) 4 B.& C. 223.

Doing and causing to be done

37

the act is immediate, so long as it is not a wilful act'.18 The rise of the tort of negligence dates from that decision, a century before Donoghue v. Stevenson.19 Doing damage was displaced by (negligently) causing damage to be done. In Roman law, once the formulary system disappeared in the third century AD, the distinction between the statutory action under the lex Aquilia and the supplementary actions on the case became conceptual, not formal. The plaintiff no longer had to choose a set of words which would tie his claim unequivocally to one or the other, but he would still conceive of his claim as arising either under the statute or in the periphery which would once have been covered by actions on the case. Nothing then prevented the plaintiff from arguing in the alternative, that the defendant was liable either as under the lex or as under the praetorian actions on the case. However, while the formulary system lasted, the plaintiff could not bring a statutory action where his facts would only support an action on the case. If he brought the statutory action, he would have to show that the defendant did the harm corpore suo. Doing, after all, does not include the other forms of causing to be done. What about the other way around? Did the Romans apply the rule of Williams v. Holland before the abolition of their forms of action, with the effect of allowing a plaintiff to bring an actio infactum even where he might have brought the statutory action? Though it would cost him whatever marginal advantages the statutory action had to offer, an action on the case would relieve the plaintiff of the burden of establishing corporeal causation. In other words, the defendant would be deprived of the opportunity of exploiting the mysteries of direct causation in order to challenge the form of action. The texts do not allow a definite answer, but it seems likely that the Williams v. Hollandposition was taken.20 Even in English law successful challenges this way round, to actions on the case rather than to trespass, were extremely rare.21

18 19 20

21

(1833) 10 Bing. 112, 117-18, per Tindal, C . J. Further: M . J. Prichard, 'Trespass, Case a n d the Rule in Williams v. Holland [1964] C.L.J. 234. [1932] A . C 562. This is all t h e m o r e likely if, as Barton argues, the jurists were hostile t o the statutory action because of the Us crescens rule which probably did n o t apply to the praetorian extensions: J. L. Barton, 'The Lex Aquilia a n d Decretal Actions', in W . A . J. W a t s o n (ed.), Daube Noster (Edinburgh, 1974), 15, 2 2 - 4 (though o n the view taken here Barton is w r o n g t o suggest that t h e words of the lex did n o t dictate the corpore suo test: see further n. 45 and text thereto). Savignac v. Roome (1794) 6 T.R. 125 was said in Williams v. Holland (1833) 10 Bing. 112, 116 t o have been wrongly brought in case only because of procedural limitations on what a court could d o o n a special demurrer with a n allegation of 'furious' driving (ibid.).

38

Peter Birks The restricted range of active harm-verbs

In Roman law liability for wrongful loss turned on the words of the lex Aquilia. The details of the text of the lex are notoriously controversial, and we can omit all that is not immediately relevant to the present discussion. It is certain that the lex said, using the active voice, that the defendant must have killed, burned, broken, burst - the verbs were occidere, urere, frangere, rumpere.22 The statute thus confronted jurisprudence with this question: when can it be said of a man that he has killed, burned, broken or burst? The lex also required that the deed be done wrongfully (iniuria), but that requirement was never interpreted to mean that he must have acted intentionally - Aquilian liability included unintentional harm, which was indeed the usual case.23 This matters, because it bars one possible answer to our question. It would have been tempting to say that a man burns when, having formed the intention that a thing should be damaged by fire, he executes that intention by bringing that damage about. The Philistines, for example, were sure that they knew who had burned up their fields, even though Samson had used an ingeniously indirect method of causing their crops to be burned up. He had tied torches to the tails of one hundred and fifty pairs of foxes, And when he had set the brands on fire, he let them go into the standing corn of the Philistines, and burnt up both the shocks, and also the standing corn, with the vineyards and olives. Then the Philistines said, Who hath done this? And they answered, Samson, the son in law of the Timnite, because he had taken his wife, and given her to his companion. And the Philistines came up, and burnt her and her father with fire.24

The basis of the finding that Samson had burned the crops, and of the horrible revenge, is his intent to bring about that result, coupled with action, however indirect, which successfully achieved his intended goal. That approach was not open under the lex Aquilia, certainly not from the moment at which it was decided that 'I did not mean to do it' was no defence. The question set for courts by defendants anxious to get off was, 'When can it be said of a man that he, not having intended to burn, has burned?' A double answer might have been a possibility, one limb for 22 23 24

A convenient review of arguments as t o the text of the principal chapters of the lex is: J. A. Crook, 'Lex Aquilia' (1984) 62 Athenaeum 67. Gaius 3.211; D.9.2.5.1. Judges 15.5-6 (Authorised Version). Verse 3, which looks interesting, mistranslates the Hebrew: see M. Black and H. H. Rowley (eds.), Peake's Commentary (London, 1962, repr. 1982), 313 ad he, where reference is also made t o a parallel at the R o m a n Cerealia.

Doing and causing to be done

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intentional burning, the other for unintentional cases. There is no sign of that in the developed law.25 It is interesting that in the delict iniuria we find no requirement of corporeal causation. Part of the reason must lie in the intentionality of that delict, part in the immateriality of the interest conceived in developed law to be protected, the integrity of the personality, not the body.26 However, equally important is the fact that in cases of physical iniuriae no text relevant to the edictal action required that what the victim suffered be described by a harm-verb used in the active voice. The model formula used the passive: 'Whereas Aulus Agerius was struck on the cheek ... for as much as on that account it shall seem fair and good that Numerius Negidius should be condemned, etc.'27 These words would reach the case both of a Numerius who struck and a Numerius who acted as decoy so that another could strike.28 If the ellipsis concealed the words 'by Numerius Negidius' the passive would be neutralised, since 'by' has equivalent effect. Lenel thought that 'a Numerio Negidio' must have been included.29 One dissents with hesitation from an unequivocal opinion of the master. But these additional words are not necessary and are not warranted by any text. When can it be said, without reference to intention, that a defendant has damaged or injured? I knock your slave into the river. He is a poor swimmer and not blessed with Horatius' strength. Everyone sees him struggling towards the bank, but he tires and goes under. I was careless, but my submission will be that I did not kill him. He was killed by the river, or by his own weakness as a swimmer.301 step into the road without looking. A carriage swerves to avoid me and hits your innocent slave on the other side of the road, breaking his leg. Again, perhaps I was careless, but surely you will not say that I broke his leg? The leg was broken by the carriage which ran over him. Show me the act of breaking. I am not a 25

26 27 28

29

30

D.9.2.39 (Pomponius 17 ad Quintum Mucium) may reveal, in the word consulto, that early on a jurist might allow intent to filter into the question whether the defendant had done the harm. Compare life, freedom, health in 823 I B.G.B., n. 1 above. O. Lenel, Das Edictum Perpetuum (3rd edn, Leipzig, 1927), 398-9. D.47.10.11 pr. (Ulpian, 57 ad edictum). Cf. the Aquilian case for which Ofilius prescribed one of the earliest actions o n the case, D.9.2.9.3 (Ulpian, 18 ad edictum), text to n. 51 below. He thought the formula would have spelled out both 'by Numerius Negidius' and, in the alternative, 'caused t o be struck through the dolus of Numerius Negidius': Edictum Perpetuum, 398. The passive demonstrate without reference t o N N suffices t o leave the liability for the event to be considered in the intentio, focusing on videbitur. T h e texts' conclusion for the statutory action o n these facts suggests a distinction overruled between the case of one who went straight under or broke his neck on hitting the water and the one who was seen to struggle only to be overcome: Celsus D.9.2.9.7 (Ulpian, 28 ad edictum); Gaius 3.219; J.Inst. 4.4.16.

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breaker. There is no ready answer to this form of argument. Deprived of the criterion of intent, it is difficult to see how any lawyer could formulate a test other than in terms of bodily energy and motion: a defendant kills, burns, etc., when he supplies the kinetic energy which brings about the effect in question. And such a test would by nature be embarrassingly narrow, clearly revealing the bad consequences of the original choice of the active voice. Even as the test began to crystallise, defendants would be armed with the means of winning against the merits, creating an imperative need for a supplementary action against those who, though they had not wrongfully burned the crops, had wrongfully caused the crops to be burned. It is not in the nature of legal authority to jump in one bound to a clear formulation of the answer to such a difficult problem. What seems to have happened is that by individual rulings the jurists pushed at the limits of the central image of a person damaging a thing,31 as, for instance, by including damage inflicted by throwing something hard or sharp at the thing32 or the thing at something hard or sharp,33 by rubbing, pouring in or injecting harmful drugs,34 by pouring things not water-resistant into muddy water,35 or watery mud into such things,36 by knocking an object from a height to the damage of something or someone below,37 by letting slip a load with the same effect,38 or by allowing a vehicle to slip down a hill crushing people below.39 The case-law picture extended, of course, to examples on the other side of the line, such as offering poison for the victim to take,40 frightening a horse which threw the victim down,41 sending a slave up a tree or down a well, so that he fell to his death,42 or watching the wind carrying your fire to a neighbour's farm.43 It has been suggested that after the end of the Republic the case-law began to narrow the limits of the statutory action.44 That would certainly be an understandable response to the difficulty of handling the defendant's argument 31 32 33 34 36 37 39 40 42 43 44

This activity of building up illustrations from a core about which all persons would agree is well conveyed by N. Andrews, 'Occidere and the Lex Aquilid' (1987) 46 C.L. J. 315. D.9.2.9.4 (Ulpian, 18 ad edictum). D.9.2.7.7 (Ulpian, 18 ad edictum) - the slave dashed against the rock. 35 D.9.2.9.1 (Ulpian, 18 ad edictum). D.9.2.27.19 (Ulpian, 18 ad edictum) D.9.2.27.20 (Ulpian, 18 ad edictum), where the messy n a t u r e of harena shows that ' u t difficilis separatio sit' is a mistaken gloss. 38 D.9.2.31 (Paul, 10 ad Sabinum). D.9.2.7.2 (Ulpian, 18 ad edictum). D.9.2.52.2 (Alfenus, 2 digestorum). 41 D.9.2.7.6 a n d 9 pr. (Ulpian, 18 ad edictum). D.9.2.9.3 (Ulpian, 18 ad edictum). Gaius 3.219; D.ll.3.3.1 (Ulpian, 23 ad edictum) with D.ll.3.4 (Paul, 19 ad edictum). Coll. 12.7.4-6 (Ulpian, IS ad edictum). W. A. J. Watson, The Law of Obligations in the Later Roman Republic (Oxford, 1965) 243; W. A. J. Watson, 'D 7.1.13.2 (Ulpian 18 ad Sabinum): The Lex Aquilia and Decretal Actions'(1966) 17 Iura 174.

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41 45

that he had not done the killing, burning, and so on, but the evidence of a stricter case-law is not secure.46 A single test of doing is the culmination. The notion that the damage must have been done by the defendant corpore suo, still only foreshadowed in Julian,47 is achieved by Gaius in the next generation, in the mid second century AD.48 The articulation of the distinction, but without the corpore test or anything like it, seems to appear in the legal texts with Celsus, at the beginning of the second century.49 But the difference must have been articulately understood much earlier. Norr shows that the distinction between doing and causing was expressed in non-legal texts in the Republic and argues that it was already expressly present in the lex Cornelia de sicariis.50 Whether or not it was actually in that lex, it is unlikely that the republican jurists were unable to articulate it. At the end of the Republic Ofilius concluded in favour of an actio in factum for the case in which the defendant had excited a horse with the effect that its rider, the plaintiff's slave, was precipitated into a river and thus met his death. This is the earliest documented actio in factum, except the one from which, in the same text, Ofilius himself analogises: the defendant lured the plaintiff's slave into an ambush and another dispatched him.51 Norr must be right in saying that Ofilius cannot but have understood and been able to articulate the difference between killing and furnishing the cause of death.52 It would have been impossible to keep the statutory action and the actio in factum in play without being able to 45

46

47 49

50

51

52

Watson suggests in 17 Iura 174, also Failures of the Legal Imagination (Edinburgh, 1988), 43, that the words of the lex did n o t require the narrow view a n d that the narrowing was the result of a deliberate policy to restrict the statutory action. That is not right; it underestimates the extent to which first the active harm-verbs a n d then the logic of the case-law which they provoked armed the defendant with an unanswerable technical defence. Cf. Barton, 'Lex Aquilia and Decretal Actions' 22-3: the 'perversity' of the juristic test of causation cannot be explained by any words in the lex itself. It is, in particular, unsafe to build much on a literal interpretation of Proculus in D.9.2.7.3 (one w h o pushes another into the victim), since we d o n o t know what facts he was addressing, and the narrowest understanding of his words is not consistent with his position in D.9.2.11.5 (one who irritates a dog which then bites the victim) and, possibly, D.9.2.11 pr. (one kicks a ball which hits a barber's a r m when he is shaving the victim). 48 D.9.2.51 pr. (Julian, 86 digestorum). Gaius 3.219. D.9.2.7.6 (Ulpian, 18 ad edictum): 'Celsus says that a crucial question is whether he killed or supplied the cause of death, in that a person w h o has supplied the cause of death is liable, n o t to the Aquilian action, but to an actio in factum' D . Norr, Causa Mortis (Munich, 1986), 15-24, 101-21. A n outline of the evidence and findings is: 'Causam Mortis Praebere\ in N . MacCormick a n d P. Birks (eds.), The Legal Mind (Oxford, 1986), 204^17. D.9.2.9.3, cf. D.9.2.11.1 (Ulpian 18 ad edictum). Watson, Obligations, 244 and 281, thinks that Servius Sulpicius, whose pupil Ofilius was, allowed the action on the case given in D.9.1.1.7 in the case of damage done by a horse in pain against the person who caused the pain. Norr, Causa Mortis, 141.

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express that difference. On the other hand there is no reason to suppose that Ofilius could have ventured the generalisation that the limits of doing were defined by the defendant's bodily force. More probably, the actio in factum simply began as a necessary recourse to meet the case in which the jurist found himself obliged to accept, without any stable test of the matter, that the harm-verb could not be satisfied - the defendant should answer for the damage but could not on any view be said to have done the killing, burning, breaking, and so on. The ambush is one good example, the Hughes facts another. The case-law on both sides of the line then continued to build up. In the end the cor pore test was proposed as the key to all the illustrations. That pattern of development seems to explain the evidence in the texts. However, although it is also compatible with almost all of Professor Norr's study of the concepts and language of indirect causation, it differs very markedly from his account in one crucial respect. The view propounded with great learning and sensitivity by Norr is very much more dependent on the words of the lex itself and, in particular, on the word used for killing in the first chapter, occidere. On the view advanced above it would not have made any difference at all if the word used for killing had been, say, necare or interficere so long only as the verb appeared in the active voice, thus creating a condition of liability that the defendant must have killed: if any one shall have wrongfully killed another's slave or four-footed beast, etc. However, Professor Norr's view is that the first chapter was about an event specific to the word occidere, narrower than killing. It was about killing-by-striking, which is what occidere originally meant.53 When it was chosen by Aquilius, or taken over by him from an earlier statute, occidere will necessarily have brought its killing-bystriking meaning into the lex.54 There are a number of difficulties with this theory. The first is that we know that the veteres, the republican jurists, dealt vigorously with a literalist interpretation of a different aspect of another chapter of the lex. The argument was that chapter 3 in using the verbs mere, frangere, rumpere had intended to deal only with three types of damage. This had nothing to do with the defendant's side of the matter. It was concerned not with the doing but with what was done. Literally, the plaintiff must have suffered a disaster of a particular description, loss from something ustwn,fractum or ruptum. But Ulpian tells us that almost all the old jurists rejected this view and held, taking the widest possible meaning of rumpere, that the chapter covered all kinds of spoiling.55 It was enough to 53 54 55

Norr, Causa Mortis, 4-9. See further below, text to nn. 57-9 and text thereto. N o r r , Causa Mortis, 1 2 1 ^ , 135-8. D.9.2.27.13 (Ulpian, 18 ad edictum).

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bring the plaintiff prima facie within the lex if the disaster which he had suffered was loss arising from a res corrupts something spoiled. In view of this dynamic attitude to the triplet in chapter 3, it is difficult to believe that the old jurists would have had much time for an argument based simply on the narrowest possible meaning of the word occidere. Less violence would have been done to occidere by the assertion that it was a general word for killing than to rumpere by treating it as though it were corrumpere.

Next, Gaius tells us unambiguously that the requirement of corporeal causation was common to both chapter 1 and chapter 3.56 Hence, if the requirement was grounded in the literal meaning of occidere, we have to believe, not only that the jurists sustained the argument for that literal meaning, but also that they carried it over to verbs to which it was entirely alien. Urere.frangere and rumpere do not in themselves contain any hint of a narrow meaning linked to striking or bodily force. It might be objected that occidere was also relevant under chapter 3 and could, so to say, have infected the other verbs, as in the killing of birds and bees and wild beasts (non-pecudes). But the answer to that is that, under chapter 3, there was no need to conduct the debate in terms of any particular killing-verb, for in the terms of the lex a killed goose was just another res rupta. So, though killing was sometimes a chapter 3 event, occidere was not itself any more in play than interficere or necare. The application of the corpore test to all statutory actions, not just to those of chapter 1, thus strongly suggests that the narrow causal test is rooted in the general problems of the active voice, not in specific shades of meaning to be discovered in the verbs chosen to describe the damage. The third objection is that the specially narrow meaning of occidere is nowhere evidenced outside the law. The etymology, from caedere, does not in itself indicate a powerfully restricted meaning, any more than its survival in other compounds such as the Latin homicidium and the English 'homicide' serves to reveal their scope at any period of their use. Julian's appeal to that etymology is much more likely to have been made in support ex post of the narrow Aquilian interpretation than as the reason for that narrow interpretation: D.9.2.51 pr. (Julian, 86 digestorum) In ordinary speech a person is said to have killed (occidisse) however he has brought about the cause of death; but under the lex Aquilia a person is only held to be liable when he has furnished the cause of death by the application of force and so to say with his hand {adhibita vi et quasi manu), the interpretation of the 56

Gaius 3.219: 'The conclusion was also reached that the statutory action lies only where someone causes loss by his bodily force. Where people cause loss in other ways actions are given based on the policy of the statute.'

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word evidently being taken from the words for smiting and slaughter {a caedendo et caede).

This passage rather carefully abstains from a direct assertion 'occidere means, or once meant, killing-by-striking'. It asserts that the word has no natural restriction to particular kinds of killing. It then invokes the etymology in support of the restrictive Aquilian understanding of the word. That etymology is drawn from Valerius Flaccus via Festus, who says that opinions differ as to whether occidere and necare should be distinguished, on the ground that the one comes a caedendo and happens ictu, the other sine ictu.51 Etymology is a guide to nuance, not to usage. There is no indication that the etymology reflected an originally narrow usage, and the quidam who favoured the narrow view of occidere need only be the lawyers driven to it by the fact of its having been employed in the active voice in the lex Aquilia. Exactly the same can be said of Labeo's definition from his exposition of the SC. Silanianum (AD 10), which, with its brutal provisions for the household of an owner murdered by a slave, required a restrictive construction.58 Literary sources suggest that occidere was always a very general word for killing. Professor Norr himself admits that already in Plautus the word is used to denote killings other than by striking, as, for example, by starvation. The word had already broken out of its killing-by-striking meaning by, he thinks, a metaphorical extension: it was used when a writer wanted to personify hunger or poison as attacking its victim as a murderer attacks with a knife.59 In this way the narrow and specific sense which supposedly gripped the lex Aquilia has to be pushed back into the dark period before Plautus. More room is made for it by casting doubt even on the 287 BC terminus post quern which most scholars accept and by supposing that the word may have been carried over from earlier leges.60 In other words the text of the lex itself has to be advanced to the earliest 57

58

59

The example instanced is Numa's law relating to a person killed by lightning (fulmine occisus): Festus 178, see FIRA, vol. I, 13 n. 2: 'Occisum a necato distingui quidam, quod alterum a "caedendo" atque ictu fieri dicunt, alterum sine ictu. Itaque in Numae Pompilii regis legibus scriptum esse: "Si hominem fulmen occisit, ne supra genua tollito", et alibi: "Homo si fulmine occisus est, ei iusta nulla fieri oportet."' D.29.5.1.17 (Ulpian, 50 adedictum): 'Occisorum appellatione eos contineri Labeo scribit, qui per vim aut caedem sunt interfecti, ut puta iugulatum strangulatum praecipitatumve saxo vel fuste vel lapide percussum vel q u o alio telo necatum.' Stein rightly points out that Labeo adopted a narrow definition of occidere, which is different from inheriting one from the past: P. Stein, 'School Attitudes to the Law of Delicts', Studi in onore di Arnaldo Biscardi, vol. II (Milan, 1982), 281, 288. And Zimmermann, Law of Obligations, 978, correctly observes that Labeo himself did not require force or violence in the Aquilian context but only physical doing, as is proved by D.9.2.9/>/*.-1 (Ulpian, 18 ad edictum) application of harmful drugs manibus. Norr, Causa Mortis, 7-8. «° Ibid., 127-8.

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45

possible date, to accommodate the hypothesis that, when the statute was enacted, occidere meant killing-by-striking. The one secure fact which we know about the date of the lex is that it had been passed before the jurist Brutus died, since he gave an opinion on its scope. That means that it must have been passed by about 125 BC. 61 Though most scholars do place it earlier, a case every bit as strong can be made for a date after the third Punic war, late in the 140s.62 In short the lex may anyhow have been passed after Plautus; even if it was passed before Plautus, there is no hard evidence that occidere ever meant killingby-striking. This touches very little of Professor Norr's account of the concepts and language of causation in the ancient world. It only substitutes the general problems of the active voice as the agent effecting the consequences which he derives from a rigidly narrow original sense of occidere, and it eliminates the question why the draftsman should have chosen or adopted that narrow word. If what is said here is correct, nobody ever chose restrictive terminology. All that happened was that the draftsman happened to express the conditions of liability using the harm-verbs in the simple active voice. Room was thus left for ingenious arguments, often but not always against the merits; and those arguments drove the lawyers to say what facts would satisfy those active verbs and to recommend actions on the case where liability needed to be extended to those who had brought about harm but had not harmed. Actions on the case were given by the praetor. And, after a long period in which the matter lay in case-law illustration, the distinction between the statutory action and the actions on the case was generalised or summed up in the test of bodily force: the statutory action lay where the defendant had done the harm corpore suo, by his bodily force. Let us underline two aspects of this story which turn out to be interlinked. First, the period of development to the mature position is very long. Even taking the latest possible date of the lex Aquilia, three centuries elapse between it and Gaius' 'corpore' test. Secondly, supplementation precedes crystallisation of the difference between doing and causing to be done. The Roman development passes through these three phases: (1) before the time of Servius Sulpicius63 the statutory action 61

62 63

Brutus was praetor in c. 140, possibly curule aedile in 146. The date of his death is not known. See R. A. Bauman, Lawyers in Republican Politics (Munich, 1983), 240. Brutus' opinion was that a blow which brought o n a n abortion counted as a rumpere within chapter 3: D.9.2.27.22. See P. Birks, 'Wrongful Loss by Co-Promisees' (1994) 22 Index 184. F o r the role of Servius (praetor 65 BC, d. 43 BC) in the development of the law, see P. Stein, T h e Place of Servius Sulpicius Rufus in the Development of R o m a n Legal Science', Festschrift fiir Franz Wieacker zum 70. Geburtstag (Gottingen, 1979), 175-84.

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stood alone, with no supplementation by actiones in factum; (2) supplementation began, as, for instance, against one who led a slave to an ambush to be killed by another, or frightened a horse which bolted and killed its rider,64 for these were fact situations in which the defendant needed to be liable but no reasonable man could say of him that he had done the harm, only that he caused it to be done; (3) first by illustration and then by abstract generalisation the law mapped the frontier between the statutory action and the actio in factum. But this sequence contains a mystery. Why should it be more pressing to locate the frontier at stage 3, when it had become a line between available actions, than at stage 1, when it marked, if it could be found, the limit of liability? The answer must be that at stage 1 the system, younger and less able to formulate and insist on difficult artificialities, relied on mechanisms of evasion and postponement. These are more clearly visible in the English story. In English law the two species of liability, for doing and causing to be done, also co-existed before anybody drew a precise line between them.65 In trespass the plaintiff affirmed that the defendant had with force and arms and against the king's peace done some harm: 'Thomas Weaver brought trespass against George Ward, and counted that on 18 October 1614 in the parish of Mary-le-Bow, London, with force and arms (namely with swords, clubs and knives), the defendant beat, wounded and illtreated the plaintiff so that his life was despaired of, against the king's peace.'66 Again: 'One Henry T. brought his writ of trespass against a woman, and supposed by his writ that she had burnt his house in G, with force and arms.'67 By contrast, the supplementary action on the case typically alleged that, within the context of a given duty, the defendant had so negligently conducted himself as to cause the plaintiff to be harmed. For example: 64 65

66 67

Text to n. 51 above. The lex Aquilia, by its very words, created a n d defined a liability in terms of active harm-verbs. In England n o superior text required that trespass be so denned, though nearly every writ of trespass did use an active harm-verb, and those that in the earlier period did n o t severely strained the words vi et armis et contra pacem. See Baker's comments on the action for knowingly keeping a dangerous animal: J. H. Baker, Spelman's Reports, vol. 2 (1977) 94 Selden Soc. 228-9. Note also Reynoldes v. Clarke (1615), in J. H. Baker and S. F. C. Milsom, Sources of English Legal History (London, 1986), 307. Similarly, the directness test aside, no superior rule actually required a writ on the case to be framed in the 'causing to be done form', although, if it were not, the defendant was likely to seek some advantage from characterising the writ as trespass: cf. The Farrier's Case (1372) Y.B. Trin. 46 Edw.III, fol. 19, pi. 19, in Baker and Milsom, Sources, 341; Jason v. Norton (1653) Style 398, Baker and Milsom, Sources, 353. Weaver v. Ward (1616) Hobart 134, extract from the record in Baker and Milsom, Sources, 331. Anon. (1374) Y.B. Mich. 48 Edw.III, fol. 25, pi. 8, printed in Baker and Milsom, Sources, 304; cf. 320.

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If William Beaulieu [shall make you secure of pursuing his claim], put [by gage and safe pledges] Roger Finglam [that he be before our justices of the Bench, etc. to show] why, whereas according to the law and custom of our realm of England until now obtaining everyone in the same realm should keep and is bound to keep his fire safely and securely so that no damage befall any of his neighbours in any wise through his fire, the aforesaid Roger kept his fire at Carlyon so negligently that for want of due keeping of the aforesaid fire the goods and chattels of the selfsame William to the value of £40 (being in the houses there) and the aforesaid houses were then and there burned by the fire, to the damage of the selfsame William etc.68 As we saw in the first part of this paper, it was not until the early eighteenth century that challenges by the defendant to the form of action, usually maintaining that a plaintiff who had brought trespass should have brought case, compelled the courts to articulate a test in terms of the elusive notion of 'directness' or 'immediacy'. 69 That might be said to be the equivalent of Gaius' enunciation of the test of bodily force. Trespass was thus crippled by the same inconveniently restrictive causal test as had cut back the Aquilian action. But liability as a whole was not so restricted, since supplementation, as at Rome, had preceded definition: 'he harmed' (trespass) had been extended by 'he caused harm to be done' (case). This supplementation had happened in two stages, indeed in two longseparated generations. Until the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century, there was no secure action on the case which could operate as a general supplement to trespass. Early supplementation, going back to the end of the fourteenth century, provided actions on the case for special instances of causing to be done, most obviously for negligently causing damage to happen within the context of a contractual or near-contractual relationship. Apart from these examples, with assumpsit-b&sed duties, there were some others, as, for instance, the action on the case for fire exemplified above, where the duty was alleged to rest on a custom of the realm. 70 This limited supplementation must have taken some pressure off trespass. 71 However, if we think of trespass as making liable anyone at all who wrongfully did damage, it remained true that there was no similarly general action on the case with the potential for making anyone at all liable who wrongfully caused damage to be done. The gap thus left was less pronounced than it 68 69 70 71

Beaulieu v. Finglam (1401) Y.B. Pas. 2 Hen.IV, fol. 18, pi. 6, printed in Baker and Milson, Sources, 557; cf. 559, 565. M. J. Prichard, "Scott v. Shepherd (1773) and the Emergence of the Tort of Negligence', Selden Society Lecture for 1973 (London, 1976), 15. Above, text to n. 68. Outside the relationship cases, cases which could not be fitted within trespass would not have been common, especially in the days before the concept of 'directness' was insisted upon. See Baker, Introduction, 463.

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might have been; it was undoubtedly reduced in size by keeping the limits of trespass - the 'he did it' claim - unexplored, the black box phenomenon discussed immediately below. Pronounced or not, that was the gap that began to befilledin the late seventeenth century. Actions on the case were then brought, and escaped challenge, which alleged or assumed an omnipresent duty to take care not to cause damage to be done. A good example, much abbreviated in the skeleton which follows, is provided by Browne v. Davis (1706):72 whereas William [Browne] . . . was possessed of a certain flat-bottomed boat . . . and . . . John Davis . . . his barge so negligently, carelessly and unskilfully managed and steered, that the said barge, for want of good and sufficient care and management... in and upon the said boat of the said William . . . then and there fell foul, and the said boat broke and sank.

The full potential of this kind of claim, assuming a general duty of care, was openly and officially realised only through the great cases of Williams v. Holland131 and Donoghue v. Stevenson.74 But as soon as such claims

could safely be advanced,75 the general supplementation of trespass became a tactical reality for every individual plaintiff, in the sense that for the first time it was possible for any plaintiff troubled by possible limitations on trespass to contemplate turning instead to an action on the case, without having to ask himself whether he fitted within the special circumstances and relationships which had previously hedged that alternative about. Moreover, as we have seen,76 this general action on the case for injury and damage had, as in Rome, the potential for handling even facts within the range of trespass itself. As in Rome after Servius Sulpicius in the late Republic,77 the definition of a trespass became a question about the choosing between two available actions, the younger of which, unless inhibited by a doctrine of subsidiarity, was capable of gobbling up all the work done by the older. The matter would have come more quickly to the boil but for keeping 72

73 75 76 77

C. H. S. Fifoot, History and Sources of the Common Law (London, 1949), 180; Baker and Milsom, Sources, 575. The example is taken from John Lilly: A Collection of Modern Entries, 3rd edn (London, 1758), 38, and W. Bohun, Declarations and Pleadings (London, 1733), 211. Baker and Milsom, Sources, say that such actions were available against masters of ships from at least 1664. 74 (1833) 10 Bing. 112, text t o n . 18 a b o v e . [1932] A . C . 562. F o r pre-eighteenth-century forerunners, see Baker, Spelman's Reports, vol. II, 291; Baker and Milsom, Sources, 567-74; Prichard, "Scott v. Shepherd, 16ff. Above, text between n. 18 a n d n. 20. N . 51 above a n d text thereto, where it is observed that Ofilius was following a model. 'After Servius' is a n approximation, since we c a n n o t be sure that it w a s he w h o first approved actions on the case to supplement Aquilian liability under the statutory action. We know only that Servius' pupil Ofilius found such actions, or one such action, in place.

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the question of liability in a black box, the jury at nisi prius.ls The jury was unlikely to be sympathetic to technical arguments against the merits. If it thought that you had negligently caused the defendant's leg to be broken, it would not respond to your attempt to insist that liability was only for breaking. Furthermore - a peculiarity of the English story wide disparities between stereotyped allegations and the real facts revealed in evidence were routine: no jury would expect to hear the formal allegations proved to the letter, and the court would not afterwards look for disparities 'with eagle's eyes'.79 In Rome there was also a black box, not a jury but, in most cases, a single iudex who gave no reasons for his decision. We must presume that he too absorbed technicalities and, in effect, postponed their resolution. However, the Roman iudex was a somewhat less efficient mechanism for suppressing nice questions. Being highly educated and bearing a responsibility which was not shared with others, he was more vulnerable to ingenious argument. Also, in England before the eighteenth century there were few means of bringing the real facts before the eyes of legal authority, the court itself.80 In Rome, by contrast, litigants could arm themselves with responsa from jurists and seek thereby to constrain the judge. In some cases English defendants did try to take the matter out of the black box by entering a special plea. The courts did not co-operate. On the contrary, they allowed the vigilant plaintiff an opportunity to win on a technicality of his own: the defendant should have taken the general issue. In Gibbons v. Pepper (1695)81 the action was trespass for assaulting, beating and wounding, in the usual form. The defendant's special plea was that the horse he had been riding took fright and ran off out of control, running down the plaintiff. It was the horse that ran down the plaintiff, not the defendant, and, further, the defendant was not to blame for it. The court took the view that this matter should have 78

79

80 81

T h e role of the jury, and other modes of decision such as compurgation, in obviating the need for scientific rules is central t o Milsom's picture of legal development: Milsom, Historical Foundations, esp. 38-52, 263-5. T h e m e t a p h o r of the black box is Frier's: B. W . Frier, The Rise of the Roman Jurists (Princeton, 1985), 230. Where a surgeon a n d apothecary sought to resist a n action o n the case brought by a patient, the C o m m o n Pleas took this view: 'But then it is said that the defendants ought t o have been charged as trespassers vi et armis; the court will not look with eagle's eyes to see whether the evidence applies exactly or not to the case, when they see that the plaintiff has obtained a verdict for such damages as he deserves, they will establish such verdict if it be possible', Slater v. Baker (1767) 2 Wils. 359, 362, relied u p o n in Scott v. Shepherd (1773) 2 W.B1. 892, 894 per N a r e s , J. (who, taking advantage of oratio obliqua, helpfully a d d s a ' b u t ' after 'case'). Cf., instancing cases of battery, Baker, Introduction, 456. Prichard, "Scottv. Shepherd, 14-15. (1695) 1 Lord Raym. 38, 2 Salk. 638; 4 Mod. 405: extracts printed with the record in Baker and Milsom, Sources, 335-7.

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been given in evidence under the general issue, thus essentially insisting that it be kept as an issue of fact for the jury and as such kept in the black box: For if I ride upon a horse and John Style whips the horse so that he runs away with me and runs over any other person, he who whipped the horse is guilty of the battery, and not me. But if I, by spurring, was the cause of the accident, then I am guilty. In the same manner, if A takes the hand of B and with it strikes C, A is the trespasser and not B.82

Gibbons v. Pepper thus shows the law resisting pressure to disentangle the causal question from the general issue. Had the defendant not tried a special plea, he would have argued to the jury, under the general issue, that (a) it was the horse which did the injury, not him, and (b) it was not his fault that the horse bolted. Baker speaks of the law's consistent failure to separate issues of causation from issues of fault.83 The reason why the causation issues never appear to have been taken separately is probably that only when mixed with assertions of blamelessness would they have enough moral weight to encourage a defendant even to try a special plea. In all other cases such matter was completely hidden from the law, lost in the arguments on evidence to the jury. Nevertheless, it cannot be pretended that there are no elements of unsolved mystery as to how the jury could so long be used to evade and postpone the separate consideration of the causal questions. The Yearbooks show that early defendants were well able to challenge the allegations of force and arms and breach of the peace.84 These allegations thus lost their natural force and became decorative words of court. You could not hope to escape liability by showing that you had not in fact used weapons or other violence. When these words had been denatured, there remained the harm-verbs. The conventional counts still said, discounting the decorative words, that the defendant had beaten, burned, and so on. It is not obvious why defendants should have had difficulty in taking the causal points inherent in the verbs, and some seem to have done so. In 1353, for example, a plaintiff brought trespass for killing a horse, and the defendant answered that he had taken it damage feasant, that it was so wild that he had had to tie it up, and that, being tied up, it later struggled 82

83 84

(1695) 1 Lord Raym. 38. Note that Ofilius would have made the one who whipped the horse liable in an action on the case. In the other example, likewise, Proculus (unless he was actually thinking of facts in which B added motion of his own) would have given an actio infactum against A: D.9.2.7.3 (Ulpian, 19 ad edictum); see n. 46 above. It does not follow, however, that the test applied is not the R o m a n test. W e have already seen that the same test can be applied differently by different people. See text from n. 13 above. Baker, Spelman's Reports, vol. II, 222-4\ cf. Milsom, Historical Foundations, 296-300. Milsom, Historical Foundations, 289-92; Baker and Milsom, Sources, 297-307.

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so much that it strangled itself.85 The argument having gone off on another point, the plaintiff succeeded. But, seeing the distinction between killing and furnishing the cause of death so close to the surface, we have to admit that we have not found the full explanation why these questions were suppressed till the eighteenth century. In 1368 a defendant to trespass for burning with force and arms was found not guilty after a jury had found specially that the fire had started suddenly in the defendant's house without his knowledge and had spread to the plaintiff's house.86 It seems likely that he had pleaded, as in the next four cases of alleged burning with force and arms, that he had not done the burning (which was in addition accidental). In Richard Tucker v. Philip and Eve Smith (1359) the defendants said, 'the house of the said Philip [the defendant] which was neighbouring on the house of the same Richard caught fire by mischance and was burned down so that the fire therefrom being blown by the wind to the aforesaid house of the aforesaid Richard came down on that house and thus it was burned by mischance, etc.'.87 This is a plea that the forces of fire and wind did the burning, not the plaintiff, mixed with insinuations of guiltlessness. In Joan Havent v. Richard Ward (1364) the defendant said, 'And as for the burning timber etc. ... a fire broke out in the houses of the adjacent neighbours from an accidental cause and thus burned the aforesaid timber ... without this, that the same Richard burned the aforesaid timber as the same Joan above complains.'88 In William Cook v. William Hasard (1387) the defendant said that he was the plaintiff's servant ordered to light a badly built oven: 'And so he, as servant of the aforesaid William Cook and by his order, put fire into the aforesaid oven in order to heat the oven. And the fire suddenly came out from the back of the oven, the same William Hasard being entirely unaware of this, through various holes and cracks ... and burned the goods and chattels and houses aforesaid.'89 This put the matter down to the force of fire itself. In John Ellis v. Nicholas Angwin (1390) the defendant said, 'And as for the burning the houses, etc. ... on the aforesaid Friday, unknown to the same Nicholas and against his will, a fire suddenly arose by mischance in the houses of the same Nicholas and burned down his houses there so that on account of a great gust of wind the fire spread rapidly to the houses of the said John, and thus by 85

86 87 88

Anon. (1353) Y.B. 27 Lib.Ass. pi. 64, printed in Baker and Milsom, Sources, 312-13; cf. 304 and 320, where a purely causal point might have been taken, as between burning and causing to be burned. Anon. (1368) Y.B. 42 Lib.Ass. pi. 9 (Essex Assizes), Baker and Milsom, Sources, 321. Select Cases of Trespass from the King's Courts 1307-1329, ed. M. S. Arnold (1987) 103 Selden Society 402. 89 Ibid., 402. Ibid., 404-5.

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mischance and against the will of the same Nicholas the harm befell the same John in this behalf; without this, that he burned the aforesaid houses as the aforesaid John by his writ and count supposes.'90 Here the conflagration of which the plaintiff complains is again attributed to the wind, and misfortune; the defendant did not do the burning and, in addition, the defendant was not to blame for the force which did do it. These all seem to be cases in which the defendant plainly denies a 'you burned' claim by saying that, though the burning happened, he did not burn, and, not surprisingly, he adds that the disaster happened contra voluntatem suam or words to that effect. By that addition the point ceases to be technical and unmeritorious. Nevertheless, the addition should not obscure the fact that these defendants were primarily saying that they did not do the burning. Fire, having a tendency to proceed with and without the aid of the wind, is particularly apt to provoke that answer. In fact the making of such answers directed to the act of burning seems to have demonstrated the imperative need for supplementation of the 'he burned the house' claim by a claim on the other pattern, 'he negligently caused the house to be burned'. Fire was one case where trespass was fully supplemented by case before the end of the fourteenth century. There were actions on the case alleging a general duty to keep fire safe based directly on the custom of the realm.91 Later there was even a second species of action on the case for fire which dispensed with the custom of the realm and simply assumed a general duty of care,92 in the same way as does the collision example from Browne v. Davis above.93 This, therefore, is one area in which we should have expected to find early attempts to draw the line between burning and causing to be burned. We do not. The supplementation was seemingly too successful. There was no embattled defence of the 'he burned' claim and hence no attempt to define its proper sphere. This evidence deepens the mystery why for the next three hundred years defendants in other forms of trespass did not succeed in taking the causal question out of the general issue. It is not quite sufficient to say simply that the law was so: the question whether you had done the harm had to be considered before the jury under a general plea of not guilty. Whatever the answer may be, the eighteenth century saw both a general supplementation of trespass by case and an increase in litigation about loss arising from injury and damage, chiefly because of better roads and more traffic.94 At the same time there was an improvement in the procedural mechanisms for bringing the real facts before the court. Through reserva90 92 93

91 Ibid., 405. See the example in the text to n. 68 above. Baker, Spelman's Reports, vol. II, 230, opining that the custom of the realm version required the fire to have been lit deliberately. 94 Text to n. 72 above. Baker, Introduction, 466-7.

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tions of points of law arising on the evidence and by taking special verdicts reciting the facts which happened rather than the conclusion to be drawn from them, it became possible to compel the court to examine the legal inferences supported by the real facts as opposed to the facts conventionally recited in the plaintiff's count. 95 When the facts were at last looked at by analytically minded jurists instead of lay juries, the distinction between doing and causing to be done necessarily crystallised along the same line as it had at Rome. Conclusion What are we left with? A liability which extends beyond intentional harm and is expressed by a harm-verb in the active voice - a person is liable if he kills a cow, burns a house, breaks a vase, and so on - will send the law down a cul-de-sac. The blindness of the alley may long remain concealed if the system resolutely insists on treating the question whether the defendant killed, burned, broke, etc. as an issue of fact, not to be mediated by any test. Defendants will want a test. If juristic authority once accepts the challenge, that test is bound to be inconveniently narrow. Such verbs require the damage to be the defendant's act. Some version of Gaius' 'bodily force' will have to be adopted. There is no other possibility. The narrow test cannot be adopted without at the same time being supplemented, since, though it will solve the problem of the active harm-verb,it will contribute nothing to the larger problem of the ultimate reach of liability. Supplementation is almost bound to begin before the inconveniently narrow test crystallises. The reason is that, long before the limitations of 'he killed, burned, broke, etc' are fully explored, it will be obvious that some defendants ought to pay who manifestly cannot be reached as doers of those deeds, not even with the help of a well-meaning and inscrutable tribunal of fact. In the end the law's way out of the cul-de-sac is likely to be, not only general supplementation of the liability based on the active harm-verbs, but permission to plaintiffs to use the supplementary action for all cases. Since wrongfully causing to be harmed naturally includes all wrongful harming, the supplementary action has only to be given its head. The original preference is thus in effect reversed: 'if he burned the house' gives way to 'if he caused the house to be burned'. At that point the system must finally confront the real problems of remote causation, as opposed to the semantic impediments put in the way by harm-verbs in the active voice. 95

Prichard, 'Scott v. Shepherd, 15, points to the eighteenth-century development of the practice of reserving points of law arising on the evidence, a device 'which ensured that any reasonable point of law arising on the facts could be brought back to Westminster if the trial judge so decided'.

The danger of definition: contrectatio and appropriation David Ibbetson

A recurrent subject of Peter Stein's writings has been the development of legal reasoning from the Roman world to the modern.1 This paper, offered as a mark of gratitude and respect to a teacher who led many a fledgeling law student on the path towards an understanding of what legal thinking is about, takes as its subject one of the problems of definition in law, the tension set up when the legal definition of an institution gets too far removed from its popular conception. 'Omnis definitio in iure civili periculosa est; parum est enim ut non subverti potest.'2 Nowhere is this warning more necessary than in the law of wrongs, whether it be the Romans' law of delict or the English law of crimes, for it is here that the legal definition is most strongly (and continually) brought up against the popular perception of wrongful conduct. Sometimes the problem is simply one of language. The legal definition of rape in English law, for example, is non-consensual intercourse with a woman by a man who knows that there is a risk that she may not be consenting or who is indifferent to whether or not she is consenting;3 English language, though, has no word in common usage to denote non-consensual sexual intercourse in circumstances where the man did 1

2 3

See in particular Regulae Iuris (Edinburgh, 1966). Among his many articles: 'The Digest Title, De Diversis Reguiis Iuris Antiqui, and the General Principles of Law', in R. A. Newman (ed.), Essays in Jurisprudence in Honor of Roscoe Pound (Indianapolis, 1962), 1 (reprinted in The Character and Influence of the Roman Civil Law (London, 1988), 53); 'Justice Cardozo, Marcus Terentius Varro and the Roman Juristic Process' (1967) 2 Irish Jurist 367; 'The Relations between Grammar and Law in the Early Principate: The Beginnings of Analogy', in La Critica del testo, Atti del II congresso internazionale della Societa Italiana di Storia del Diritto (Florence, 1971), 75; 'The Two Schools of Roman Jurists in the Early Roman Principate' [1972B] Cambridge Law Journal 8; 'The Development of the Notion of Naturalis Ratio\ in W. A. J. Watson (ed.), Daube Noster (Edinburgh, 1974), 305; 'Sabino contra Labeone: due tipi di pensiero giuridico romano' (1977) 19 B.I.D.R. 55; 'Logic and Experience in Roman and Common Law' (1979) 59 Boston University Law Review 437 (reprinted in Character and Influence of Roman Civil Law, 37). D.50.17.202 (Javolenus, 11 Epistularum); see Stein, Regulae Iuris, 70. Sexual Offences (Amendment) Act 1976 s. 1; Director of Public Prosecutions v. Morgan [1976] A.C. 182; Satnam (1983) 78 Cr.App.Rep. 149. See S. Gardner, 'Reckless and Inconsiderate Rape' [1991] Criminal Law Review 172.

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55

genuinely believe that the woman was consenting.4 In popular parlance such a situation is rape; in law it is not. Sometimes a problem can be caused when the overlay of the legal definition on the popular conception is close but not exact. The offence of burglary is defined (inter alia) as theft committed by a person who has entered a building as a trespasser,5 a definition fairly close to the popular usage of the word. But what if property is stolen by a person who has a general permission to enter? In Jones and Smith6 it was argued that such a person (in this case the son of the family, who had entered his parents' home with an accomplice in the dead of night and stolen their television set) could not in law be a trespasser and hence could not be guilty of burglary.7 The legal point is difficult, yet his conduct in breaking into a house at night and stealing clearly fell four-square within the ordinary conception of burglary: that, presumably, was why he was charged with burglary rather than simply with theft, of which he was clearly guilty. When faced with such potentially inconvenient results flowing from the use of technical legal terms, the courts have a propensity to avoid them by asserting that civil law concepts should have no part to play in the criminal law;8 but it may be more accurate to see the conflict not so much as between criminal law and civil law as between technical legal definitions and untechnical popular conceptions. Sometimes, however, there can develop a more substantial disjunction between a legal definition of a wrong and its underlying conception. This is peculiarly marked in the case of theft, where both classical Roman law and modern English law reveal a very broad approach to the construction of legal liability. In both systems the original notion of theft involves a removal of another's property;9 in both systems the physical act of theft comes to be defined as no more than an interference with another's property, a contrectatio in Roman law, an 'appropriation' in English law; but, in opposition to this definition, in both systems the idea of taking remains at the heart of the conception of theft. In Roman law the 4

5 7 8 9

The overtones of the word 'rape' have caused some jurisdictions to replace it with an offence of'criminal sexual conduct' or the like. See J. Temkin, Rape and the Legal Process (London, 1987), 118-19. 6 Theft Act 1968 s. 9(1) (b). [1976] 1 W.L.R. 672. The argument was rejected on the facts of the case. For criticism, see G. L. Williams, Textbook of Criminal Law (2nd edn, London, 1983), 812-14. J. C. Smith, 'Civil Law Concepts in the Criminal Law' [1972B] Cambridge Law Journal 197. Other legal systems generally show the same starting-point: G. P. Fletcher, Rethinking Criminal Law (Boston, 1978), 3-29. We may see Roman law as typical of early IndoEuropean systems: C. Watkins, 'Studies in Indo-European Legal Language, Institutions and Mythology', in G. Cardona (ed.), Indo-European and Indo-Europeans (Philadelphia, 1970), 321, 334-45.

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distinction between the two levels remained more or less visible, for while the physical act required ground liability for furtum was a simple contrectatio, the mental state of the wrongdoer could be specified as an animus furandi,10 an intention to steal, which clearly involved more than an intention to handle. In English law the distinction is less easily visible, for the mental element, the mens rea, is more precisely defined as 'an intention permanently to deprive' the other of his property; in consequence there is no place for a general 'intention to steal' and no idea of stealing clearly distinct from the idea of appropriating. Taking and interfering

The early Roman conception of furtum as taking11 seems to have survived until towards the end of the Republic. For Sabinus it was sufficient that there had been an improper interference - adtrectatio12 and later jurists refer commonly to contrectatio, which seems to mean the same thing.13 The shift had probably begun to occur before the time of Sabinus: the fact that jurists of the generation or so before him dealt with problems of touching suggests that the move away from the older conception had already begun by the middle of the first century BC.14 There may have been a number of reasons for this move. In part it may have been because of a desire to impose liability on unsuccessful thieves, which could not be achieved directly in a system whose criminal law was still limited and contained no theory of attempts.15 In part it might have been because of the need to deal with the situation where furtum was committed by a depositee or similar person already in possession of another's property.16 More generally there may have been difficulties with the whole idea of furtum manifestum; could a person caught in the act of carrying away goods and prevented from so doing be treated as a 10 11

12 13 14

15 16

Infra, n. 44. D. Daube, Turtum Proprium and Furtum Improprium' (1937) 6 Cambridge Law Journal 217; B. Albanese, kLa nozione del furtum fino a Nerazio' (1953) 23 Annali Palermo, 1; J. A. C. Thomas, 'Contrectatio, Complicity, and Furtum' (1962) 13 Iura 70, 87 n. 51; W. A. J. Watson, The Law of Obligations in the Later Roman Republic (Oxford, 1965), 220. The contrary approach of P. Huvelin, Etudes sur le furtum (Lyons, 1915) cannot be supported. Nodes Atticae 11.18.20, 21, 23. W. W. Buckland, 'Contrectatio' (1941) 57 L.Q.R. 467, 469. D.47.2.21 pr. (Ulpian, 40 ad Sabinum\ citing Trebatius and Ofilius. See too D.41.1.5.1 (Gaius, 2 Rerum Cottidianarum), based on a substrate of Trebatius (Albanese, 23 Annali Palermo 84ff.); the stress on the mental element points to an attenuation of the physical element of the delict. Buckland (1941) 57 L.Q.R. 468 (citing Mommsen). G. D. MacCormack, 'Definitions: Furtum and Contrectatio' [1977] Acta Juridica 129, 132-4.

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thief at all? Similarly, the provision of the Twelve Tables excusing the killing of a nocturnal thief would have looked rather hollow if it could be argued that the person killed could not have been a thief unless he had succeeded in carrying off the goods. A single feature lies behind each of these possible reasons: the later republican jurists' increasing concern with accuracy of definition.17 The classical Roman lawyers, then, adopted a definition of furtum as a contrectatio rei fraudulosa, adding an additional mental element that it must have been lucri faciendi gratia.1* Contrectatio itself, with its overtones of improper touching,19 was treated as meaning any wrongful handling of (or interference with) a thing belonging to another. Yet this definition did not displace the basic conception offurtum as involving the actual removal of property; the most common word used to describe the act of stealing is subripere, with contrectare normally being used to designate the interference with goods which have been stolen already20 or simply to underline the minimal condition for liability.21 The focus on removal remained easily visible through the word's etymology - the derivation from ferre and auferre is clearly the most plausible of those suggested by Paul22 - and Aulus Gellius hints at the common belief of his time that furtum requires a carrying off.23 The definition offurtum as contrectatio was therefore established as something different from its underlying conception, and many of the problems of the law can be seen as stemming from the tension set up between these two levels. The same development and the same tension are visible in modern English law. The early English law of larceny, like the Roman, required an asportation.24 Even by the seventeenth century it had been established that, although asportation required that the goods be moved, they did not 17

18 19 20 21

22 23

24

Stein, Regulae Iuris, 26-48; and, with particular reference t o the development of the law of theft, 'School Attitudes in the L a w of Delicts', in Studi in onore di Arnaldo Biscardi, vol. II (Milan, 1982), 281-7. D.47.2.1.3 (Paul, 39 ad edictum). I n his Institutes (4.1.1) Justinian adopts the same definition, though omitting lucri faciendi gratia. D . Pugsley, 'Contrectatio' (1980) 15 Irish Jurist 341 (reprinted in Americans are Aliens (Exeter, 1989), 89). D.47.2.17.1 (Ulpian, 39 ad Sabinum); D.47.2.52.27 (Ulpian, 37 ad edictum); D.47.2.61 (Africanus, 7 Quaestionum); DAI.2.61.1 (Paul, 7 ad Plautium). D.47.2.52.19 (Ulpian, 37 ad edictum); D.47.2.66 (Ulpian, 1 ad edictum aedilium curulium); D.47.2.22 pr., 1 (Paul, 9 ad Sabinum). Similar in force are D.47.2.20.1 (Paul, 9 ad Sabinum) a n d D.47.2.56 (Ulpian, 3 Disputationum), in b o t h of which the word is used explicitly by way of contrast t o a verb connoting carrying off. D.47.2.1 pr. (Paul, 39 ad edictum). Noctes Atticae 11.18.13. Cf. G.3.195: ' F u r t u m autem fit n o n solum c u m quis intercipiendi causa rem alienam amovet, sed generaliter c u m quis rem alienam invito d o m i n o contrectat.' T h a t Gaius thinks this worth saying strongly suggests that he recognised the need t o disabuse his audience of the belief. See T h o m a s (1962) 13 Iura 87 n. 5 1 . J. H . Baker, Introduction to English Legal History (3rd edn, L o n d o n , 1990), 605-6.

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have to be removed very far; in Simson25 it was held that taking goods from a chest and putting them on the floor nearby was sufficient to ground a conviction. Nevertheless, this requirement that there be some movement of the thing survived and was put on a statutory basis in the Larceny Act of 1916;26 as one commentator described the law, The test seems to be: Has every atom left the place in which that particular atom was before?'27 The shift towards a yet more broad definition of the physical act required to constitute theft occurred with the enactment of the Theft Act 1968, which replaced the old requirement of a 'taking and carrying away' with the less clear term 'appropriation',28 itself further defined as 'Any assumption by a person of the rights of an owner'.29 While it was probably not the intention seriously to loosen the actus reus of theft,30 commentators immediately recognised that 'assuming the rights of an owner' could occur some time before there had been any taking and carrying away, so that cases which would not have been classified as larceny would fall within the definition of theft.31 One, with considerable foresight, went so far as to suggest that 'assuming the rights of an owner' was such a broad conception that any case which would have constituted attempted larceny would now have to be classified as the full offence of theft.32 This very broad interpretation was accepted by the House of Lords in the leading case of Morris'?31 an 'appropriation' could be constituted by any minimal interference with another's property. Nevertheless the underlying idea of carrying off remains central to the popular conception of theft,34 and continues to exert a considerable influence over the operation of the law. The primacy of the mental element

The attenuation of the physical element in furtum led inevitably to an increasing sharpness of focus on the mental state of the wrongdoer. It was only by paying attention to the wrongdoer's state of mind that it was 25 27 28 29 30

31

32 34

26 (1664)Kcl.31. S. 1(1). J. W. C. Turner (ed.), Kenny's Outlines of Criminal Law (19th edn, Cambridge, 1966), 257. S. 1(1): ' A person is guilty of theft if he dishonestly appropriates property belonging t o another with the intention of permanently depriving the other of it.' S. 3(1). See the eighth report of the Criminal Law Revision Committee, Theft and Related Offences ((1966) C m n d . 2977), para 35: '[T]he offence will extend to ordinary stealing by taking property from another's possession.' It was this report that laid the basis for the new offence of theft. J. C. Smith, The Law of Theft (1st edn, London, 1968), para. 27; E. Griew, The Theft Act 1968 (1st edn, London, 1968), para. 2.23 (implicitly); R. R. Stuart, 'Reform of the Law of Theft' (1967) 30 Modern Law Review 609, 624-5. 33 Stuart (1967) 30 Modern Law Review 626. [1984] A.C. 320. See, for example, Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. 'steal', 'thief. The primacy of the popular conception is transparently visible in S. Gardner, 'Is Theft a Rip-Off?' (1990) 10 O.J.L.S. 441. It is central to the speech of Lord Lowry in Gomez [1993] A.C. 442.

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possible to distinguish between interferences which were theftuous and interferences which were not. It was not sufficient simply to specify that the interference had to be against the will of the owner, for such a test would not enable the Romans to draw any line between fur turn and those cases of iniuria or damnum iniuria datum that involved a deliberate invasion of property. So long as liability was limited to cases of actual taking away, there was little need for precision in the specification of the mental element of the wrongdoer; it was enough that he had acted deliberately. Thus in D.47.2.67.2 Paul reports the view of the veteres that furtum was committed by the man who dolo malo summoned a muleteer to court with the result that his mules disappeared.35 By the end of the Republic, though, as the physical element had become more attenuated wefindincreasingly an emphasis that the wrongdoer had acted with a view to gain, lucri faciendi causa}6 This also served to put a stop to the later republican tendency to extend the delict from the straightforward paradigm of taking to include cases of wrongfully causing loss, even where there was no gain. As well as the problematic case of the muleteer,37 liability in furtum may have attached to the man who chased a peacock with the result that it was lost,38 or by the person who waved a red rag at cattle, causing them to flee.39 By the middle of the second century this expansive tendency had been checked, and the conception of furtum restricted to cases where there 35

36 37

38

39

Paul, 7 ad Plautium: ' E u m q u i m u l i o n e m d o l o m a l o in ius vocasset, si interea m u l a e perissent, furti teneri veteres responderunt'. There is nothing in the text t o suggest that the mules have been taken away by a third party; the clear implication is that they have wandered. F o r example, Sabinus' definition reported in Nodes Atticae 11.18.21. See generally J. A. C. Thomas, 'Animus Furandi' (1968), 19 Iura 1, 2-6. D.47.2.67.2 (Paul, 7 ad Plautium). Watson has argued that this would mean that the wrongdoer was liable without animus furandi, which he would regard as an untenable belief ('Contrectatio as an Essential of Furtum' (1961) 77 L.Q.R. 526-7, '"Contrectatio" Again' (1962) 28 S.D.H.I. 337); yet this is what the text seems to say. But it does not seem too far-fetched to see this as indicating a broadening of the mental element and the causal connexion between the acts of the wrongdoer and the loss of the goods, analogous to the extension of the physical element visible in the move from subtraction to contrectatio. The only difference is that the latter became established law while the former did not. D.47.2.37 (Pomponius, 19 ad Sabinum: 'Si pavonem meum mansuetum, cum de domo mea effugisset, persecutus sis quoad is pent, agere tecum furti ita potero [si aliquis eum habere coeperit].' ' S i . . . coeperit' has all the marks of an explanatory comment, though whether a comment of Pomponius on Sabinus or of a later hand on Pomponius is less easy to determine; the parallel formation 'cum quis fugitivi fur esse coeperit' in D.47.2.36 pr. (Ulpian, 41 ad Sabinum, quoting Pomponius) suggests that it might be genuine Pomponius, but for present purposes it does not matter. See Watson (1961) 77 L.Q.R. 526, 527-9. D.47.2.50.4 (Ulpian, 37 ad edictum), G.3.202. Analogous situations were discussed: knocking coins out of the hand or throwing goods overboard with the result that they are lost (D.9.2.27.21 (Ulpian, 18 adedictum); D.19.5.14.2 (Ulpian, 41 ad Sabinum); D.19.5.23 (Alfenus, 3 Digestorum a Paulo Epitomatorum); D.47.2.52.13 (Ulpian, 37 ad edictum)); freeing an animal or a slave (D.4.3.7.7 (Ulpian, 11 adedictum); D.41.1.55 (Proculus, 2

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was some intention to make a gain either for the wrongdoer himself or for some person acting in concert with him.40 The malicious waver of the red rag was now liable to the actiofurti only if he was assisting another to take the cattle, and not if he merely caused them to charge over a precipice or to be lost;41 in the latter case he might still be liable, but only to a decretal actio infactum.42 As the physical element of furturn became attenuated, so it became necessary to be more specific in the formulation of the wrongdoer's mental state. No longer was it sensible to require simply that the act have been done dolo malo\ it had to have been done furtifaciendi causa43 or animo furandi.44 Any handling of a thing may constitute furtum, but only if it is part of a removal of the thing; and normally the only way to determine whether it is part of a removal is to examine the state of mind of the wrongdoer.45 This had the effect of narrowing the potential scope of furtum, and also of anchoring the legal scope of furtum to its popular conception. In the same way as the Romans, as the physical requirement of the crime of theft became broader the English lawyers shifted from a loose and undefined 'felonious intent'46 to a more precisely defined requirement that there must have been an intention to deprive the owner of his property.47 Nevertheless, English law has not yet gone as far as the Romans did in delimiting the mens rea in order to keep the offence of theft within reasonable bounds. There is no requirement in the legislation that

40 41 42

43

44

45 46 47

Epistularum)). That the texts say so consistently that a n actio furti is n o t available suggests that there was once a view that it would lie. See generally J. L. Barton, 'The Lex Aquilia a n d Decretal Actions', in Watson (ed.), Daube Noster, 15. F o r the development of furtum ope et consilio see G. M a c C o r m a c k , ' O p e Consilio F u r t u m F a c t u m ' (1983) 51 T.v.R. 271. See the texts referred to supra, n. 39. Similarly the glossed reference to falling into the hands of thieves in the case of the peacock, D.47.2.37 (supra, n. 38). Tradition treats the actio in factum as an offshoot of the lex Aquilia, b u t this is t o o simplistic. F o r present purposes it is enough to recognise that in his Institutes (G.3.202) Gaius treats it as a case of not-furtum. Whatever analytical nicety might have suggested, from a pedagogical point of view it was this that h a d to be stressed. D.47.2.1.1 (Paul, 39 ad edictum); DAI.2.22 pr., 1 (Paul, 9 ad Sabinum); DAI.2.21.1 (Ulpian, 41 adSabinum); D.47.2.39pr. (Ulpian, 41 adSabinum); D.47.2.91.1 (Javolenus, 9 ex Posterioribus Labeonis). D Al.239 pr., holding that rapere a prostitute is not furtum if the motive is lust rather than theft, appears to cause difficulties, but they are convincingly dispelled by Thomas (1962) 13 Iura 72-6. D.47.2.43.5 (Ulpian, 41 ad Sabinum); D.47.2.52.20 (Ulpian, 37 ad edictum); D.47.2.76 (Pomponius, 21 adQuintum Mucium); P.S.2.31.35 (FIRA 2.356). Thomas (1968), 19 Iura 1. Handling after removal (supra, n. 20) is an exception to the normal rule. E. H. East, A Treatise of the Pleas of the Crown (London, 1803), 662. Cabbage (1815) R. & R. 292. Cf. Holloway (1848) 3 Cox 241 (where the increasing precision is treated by Denman, C J . as a recent, and not wholly desirable, development).

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the wrongdoer should have any view to gain, merely that he should intend permanently to deprive the other of his property.48 In theory, therefore, the deliberate release of a caged bird49 or the intentional destruction of another's property could be treated as theft, even though in practice they would invariably be regarded as criminal damage.50 The popular conception of theft as unauthorised taking may still essentially determine the scope of the offence, but only by directing the way in which prosecutorial discretion operates rather than by dictating formal legal rules. The physical element

The most obvious difficulty stemming from the adoption of a definition of furtum based on contrectatio, assuming that we should take this to connote an improper handling, was that there may have been cases which were generally regarded as furtum but where there was no physical touching.51 What of the hypothetical case put by Buckland of the chasing of your hen into my hen-house?52 What of the refusal to return a pledge or to hand over another's swine which have been rescued from wolves?53 What of the person who lends a seller false weights with the result that he obtains a lesser price for his goods?54 In all of these situations the owner is deprived of his property, and it can hardly have made a difference 48 49 50

51

52 53

S. 1(1). Williams, Textbook of Criminal Law, 766. J. C. Smith a n d B. H o g a n , Criminal Law (7th edn, L o n d o n , 1992), 504 n. 14; Williams, Textbook of Criminal Law, 765-6. E. Griew, The Theft Acts 1968 and 1978 (6th edn, L o n d o n , 1990), para. 2.79. Sometimes, however, a charge of theft is preferred when property has simply been destroyed: J. N . Spencer, 'Mere Baubles' (1978) 42 Journal of Criminal L a w 125, 126-7. It has, however, been suggested that it is necessary to consider the mental state of the accused in order t o determine whether a n act constitutes a n appropriation: Morris [1984] A . C . 320, 332-3 (already recognised by o n e far-sighted c o m m e n t a t o r in 1968: E. Griew, The Theft Act 1968 (1st edn), para. 3.23): switching price labels as a malicious p r a n k would n o t be a n appropriation. Perhaps in the light of this theft can to some extent be marked off from criminal damage. But see Gomez [1993] A . C . 442, 460. Even W a t s o n , w h o argues most strongly for the requirement of actual physical contact, seems to concede that there may be cases of furtum without it: 'The Definition of F u r t u m a n d the Trichotomy' (1960) 28 T.v.R. 197, 198. (1941) 57 L.Q.R. 468. I n b o t h of which cases U l p i a n w o u l d allow t h e actio furti: DAI.2.52.1 (Ulpian, 37 ad edictum); D.41.1.44 (Ulpian, 19 ad edictum). F o r the m o r e difficult case of the denial of

deposit, see J. A. C. Thomas, 'Infitiando Depositum Nemo Facit Furtum', in Studi in

54

onore di Edouardo Volterra, vol. II (Milan, 1971), 759. D.47.2.52.22 (Ulpian, 37 ad edictum), D.4.3.18.3. (Paul, 11 ad edictum); discussed by P. G . Stein, Fault in the Formation of Contract in Roman Law and Scots Law (Aberdeen,

1958), 94-7. The latter text refers to Trebatius' argument for the appropriateness of the actio de dob, and therefore by implication his denial of the actio furti; Trebatius may have taken an extreme view; supra, n. 14.

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whether or not the wrongdoer or his accomplice had fortuitously touched it. If the essence of furturn had been simply a wrongful interference, it might have been possible to hold that there could be fur turn of land. This was Sabinus' view55 and others may have agreed with him, but the popular opinion that there could not hzfurtum of land came to prevail in classical law.56 It might have been possible to explain this away on the grounds that the wrongful occupier of land57 could not in the nature of things ever have had an animus furandi, assuming that this connoted an intention to take away. What, though, of the analogous case of the person who handles a chest with the intention of carrying it off but finds he is incapable of moving it? This, by definition, cannot be explained away on the grounds of lack of intention, yet Ulpian is clear that it cannot be fur turn.5* Nor can it be explained as a crude rule that a man cannot be liable for the furturn of a thing too heavy for him to lift.59 Apparently, and quite logically, he is not guilty of fur turn of the chest on the straightforward grounds that he was not stealing it. The case of the heavy chest is just one instance of a more general problem raised by the Roman definition of contrectatio, the problem of the measure of damages for the theft of part of a whole. In English law if I handle a purse with the intention of taking away some of its contents it does not really matter whether I am treated as stealing the purse-pluscontents or merely the money which it contained;60 it is simply a question of how the charge is drafted. In Roman law the problem was acute, though, since the damages recoverable were assessed as twice the value of the thing stolen. It was in this context that the tension between handling and carrying off, contrectatio and asportatio, received its most substantial consideration. 55 56 57 58

59

60

NoctesAtticaellASM. D.47.2.25/?r. (Ulpian, 41 ad Sabinum): 'Verum est q u o d plerique p r o b a n t , fundi furti agi n o n posse.' O r , to use Sabinus' example, the person w h o dishonestly sold land belonging to another: Nodes Atticae 11.18.13. D.47.2.21.8 (41 ad Sabinum), considered below, p . 67. T h e reference to the same problem in 21 pr. suggests that it might have been a commonly discussed hypothetical. I a m n o t convinced by T h o m a s ' assumption, n o t d e m a n d e d by the wording of the text, that Ulpian must have been considering the situation where the chest was so obviously heavy that the wrongdoer could n o t have h a d the intention of carrying it off: 'D.47.2.21', in Synteleia Arangio-Ruiz, vol. II (Naples, 1964), 607, 613. Hence t h e immediate qualification in D.47.2.21.9 that he might have helpers, all of w h o m would (in accordance with general principles of cumulative liability in delictual actions) be liable in full. Cf. Easom [1971] 2 Q . B. 315. There might be a problem if the purse was empty a n d I could show that I h a d n o intention of taking in such circumstances, b u t the better view is

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The question is discussed at some length by Ulpian, in D.47.2.21 pr.-S,61 a passage of no little complexity. The text may simply be irredeemably corrupt, but the fact that it is extremely difficult to make sense of the highly condensed argument is not in itself a reason for so concluding; what follows is based on the assumption that the text is substantially genuine, and that it makes substantial sense. If I follow Ulpian's reasoning, his argument takes the form of an extended critique in four sections (/?r., 1-^, 5-6, 7-8) of the notion (of Sabinus?) that the simple handling of the thing with the appropriate mental state is sufficient in itself to constitute fur turn. The first section - 21 pr. - introduces the problem, drawing attention to the tension between the idea of furtum as contrectatio and furtum as subreptio.62 The conflict is stated starkly. The man who takes a measure out of a whole heap of corn or a small quantity of wine from a barrel is held - presumably by Sabinus63 - to commit furtum of the whole, for he has committed a contrectatio of the whole; on the reasonable assumption that the heap is a universitas, this seems an unavoidable conclusion, indistinguishable from the analogy (cited by Ulpian) that a person who touches a slave's ear must be regarded as touching the slave. On the other hand, says Ulpian, the damages should be assessed solely by reference to the amount that he took.64 The conclusion that it is the taking away that is relevant is then supported by two analogous situations ('Nam et... Sed et

61

62

63 64

that I am stiii guilty of the offence: Smith, The Law of Theft (6th edn, London, 1989), para. 136. Ulpian, 40 ad Sabinum. The inscription attributes the passage to Paul, but this seems an obvious mistake, and the emendation to Ulpian is almost universally admitted. 21.9 and 10 constitute a brief coda to what I take to be the main argument. For discussion of the text, see in particular K. Olivecrona, Three Essays in Roman Law (Lund, 1949), 43-51 and Thomas, Synteleia Arangio-Ruiz, 11.609-15. 'Volgaris est quaestio an is qui ex acervo frumenti modium sustulit totius rei furtum faciat an verum eius tantum quod abstulit. Ofilius totius acervi furem esse putat; nam et qui aurem alicuius tetigit inquit Trebatius totum eum videri tetigisse; proinde et qui dolium aperuit et inde parvum vini abstulit non tantum eius quod abstulit verum totius videtur fur esse. Sed verum est in tantum eos furti actione teneri quantum abstulerunt. N a m et si quis armarium quod tollere n o n poterat aperuerit, et omnes res quae in eo erant contrectaverit, atque ita discesserit, deinde reversus u n a m ex his abstulerit, et antequam se reciperet quo destinaverat deprehensus fuerit, eiusdem rei et manifestus et nee manifestus fur erit. Sed et qui segetem luce secat et contrectat eius quod sequente nocte asportans deprehenditur manifestus et nee manifestus fur est.' I have followed Mommsen's generally accepted emendation of the last sentence; for a different view, see MacCormack [1977] Acta Juridica 129, 135. Albanese, 23 Annali Palermo 140 n. 126. I cannot accept Olivecrona's view that this sentence ('sed verum ... abstulerunt') is interpolated {Three Essays in Roman Law, 44 n. 3). O n the contrary, the opposition between it and the preceding part of the text is essential t o the logic of the argument.

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...'). First, the person who handles all the contents of a chest65 and goes away, who then returns and is caught in the act of carrying off one individual item; here he is a/wr manifestus of the item he actually takes. But this might be distinguished from the initial situation of taking part of a heap, for here the separate items are clearly individual res. Hence the second, stronger, analogy: the person who cuts corn by day and goes away, who then returns by night and is caught carrying off part of it; again he is a fur manifestus of the part he carries off.66 In both cases it is the carrying off rather than the simple handling that determines the liability of the wrongdoer. The second section, 21.1—4,67 explores the same problem from a different angle. A man deposits a bag containing twenty coins and then, by mistake of the depositee, receives back a bag containing thirty; on the assumption that he knows that the bag contains thirty, but believes that twenty of these are the coins originally deposited, he is held liable68 for furtum of only ten.69 We must take it that this is a straightforward deposit and not depositum irregulare, and that the depositor is wrong in believing that his own twenty are contained in the bag.70 Here, then, is the case of the subreptio of the whole, but with the animus furandi only as to a part; liability is determined by the animus. Ulpian immediately puts the con65 66

67

68 69

70

The chest is stated to be too heavy to lift, so as to avoid the argument that he might be liable for furtum of the entirety. In both cases the text as it stands states that he commits furtum nee manifestum (by handling) as well as furtum manifestum. Thomas' arguments (Synteleia Arangio-Ruiz, 11.609-10) that the reference to furtum nee manifestum are interpolated are compelling. ' 1 . Si is qui viginti nummorum saccum deposuisset, alium saccum, in quo scit triginta esse, errante eo qui dabat, acceperit, putavit autem illic sua viginti esse, teneri furti decem nomine placet. 2. Si quis aes subripuit, dum aurum se subripere putat, vel contra, ex libro octavo Pomponii ad Sabinum, aut minus esse cum plus esset, eius quod subripuit furtum committit: idem Ulpianus. 3. Sed et si quis subripuit furto duos sacculos, unum decem, alterum viginti, quorum alterum suum putavit, alterum scit alienum, profecto dicemus tantum unius, quern putavit alienum, furtum eum facere, quemadmodum si duo pocula abstulerit, quorum alterum suum putavit, alterum scit alienum; nam et hie unius fit furtum. 4. Sed si ansam in poculo suam putavit [vel vere fuit], totius poculi eum furtum facere Pomponius scripsit.' There is an obvious problem with 21.2, most easily explained by treating it in part as a text from Pomponius ad Sabinum (presumably book 18, which dealt with furtum) which has become embedded in the extract from Ulpian. For an elaborate palaeographical explanation of the difficulties of this text see J. Miquel, 'Mechanische Fehler in der Uberlieferung der Digesten' (1963) 80 Z.S.S. 233, 256^8. 'Teneri . . . placet' suggests that this is not just Ulpian's opinion. There are admittedly formal difficulties with the passage, but Albanese's suggestion (23 Annali Palermo 145-6) that Ulpian's actual decision was that he was liable for the full thirty involves too radical a change and disregards the inner logic of the argument. Otherwise it is a straightforward case of knowing receipt of an over-payment, which would not fit with the sense of the passage.

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trasting case: if I take copper believing it to be gold, for example, I am liable for what I actually take, and not for what I believe I am taking. The problem is to reconcile these two decisions; this is done by considering closely the nature of the universitas. If I take two purses, one containing ten and the other twenty coins, believing that one belongs to me, then I am only liable for the one which I knew was not mine.71 Hence, applying the reasoning back to 21.1, the bag containing thirty has to be treated as two logically distinct parts: the twenty to which I think I am entitled and the ten to which I do not.72 In 21.4 the contrast is finally underlined between the universitas and the single res: if I take a cup, believing that the handle which is attached to it belongs to me,731 am liable for the furtum of the whole cup. The function of 21.1-4 in the context of Ulpian's argument can thus be seen. When dealing with furtum as a universitas, logic demands that it be treated not as a single entity, but in terms of its component parts. The implication for the resolution of the initial problem, taking the measure of corn from the heap, is obvious: liability cannot simply be determined by considering the heap as a single thing. The next section -21.5-6 74 - returns to the initial problem, applying this reasoning to it. What if a man removes a sextarius of corn from a shipload, or a small quantity of wine from a ship's hold? Working from the simple case of the removal of goods from a warehouse (horreum), which (he says) could hardly be furtum of the whole of the contents of the warehouse, Ulpian concludes that we should similarly not say that the abstracter of the corn or wine was liable for the furtum of the whole cargo.75 We must see here three distinct questions, in increasing order of difficulty: 71 72

73 74

75

'The case is too simple for argument' (C. H. M o n r o , Digest XLVII.2. De Furtis (Cambridge, 1893), 28 n. 3). This is precisely the point of it. Ulpian's treatment of unitary sums of money may not have been typical. In D.45.1.1.4 (48 ad Sabinum) he holds that an obligation to pay ten arises where there is a stipulatio to pay ten and a promise t o pay twenty or a stipulatio t o pay twenty and a promise to pay ten; iicet enim oportet congruere summam, attamen manifestissimum est viginti et decem inesse'. This passage is normally regarded as interpolated (see R. Backhaus, 'In Maiore Minus Inest' (1983) 100 Z.S.S. 152-5), b u t the reasoning closely parallels the present passage. 'Vel vere fuit' is clearly a gloss. '5. Sed si de navi onerata furto quis sextarium frumenti tulerit, utrum totius oneris an vero sextarii tantum furtum fecerit? Facilius hoc quaeritur in horreo pleno; et durum est dicere totius furtum fieri. [Et quid si cisterna vini sit, quid dicet? Aut aquae cisterna?] Quid deinde si nave vinaria (ut sunt multae in quas vinum effunditur), quid dicemus de eo qui vinum hausit? An totius oneris fur sit? Et magis est ut et hie non totius dicamus. 6. Certe si proponas in apotheca amphoras esse vini easque subtractas, singularum furtum fit, non totius apothecae, quemadmodum si ex pluribus rebus moventibus in horreo reclusis unam tulerit.' 'Et quid si cisterna ... cisterna?' has all the marks of a marginal gloss incorporated into the text; this would also explain the active voice and third person of dicet.

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(a) the simple case of taking goods from a horreum; this is not fur turn of the whole, for it is easy to see that the individual items are obviously separate res. (b) the removal of corn from the shipload;76 following Pomponius, Ulpian might allow that the ownership of the corn remained vested in its original owners, if the mixing had been done without their consent,77 so that the taking of the sextarius could be logically indistinguishable from the easy case of the removal of goods from the horreum. (c) the removal of wine from the cistern; here the mixing of different persons' wine would have destroyed the individual ownership, and the resultant mass would have been subject to common ownership even if the mixing had been done without the owners' consent.78 It could not therefore be treated as individual res. Still, though, we would not treat this as fur turn of the whole. It is this last case which marks the true equivalent of the original situation of 21 /?/*., and which is the logical parallel with the bag containing thirty coins dealt with in 21.1. Strengthening this parallel, Ulpian now uses exactly similar reasoning as that used to link 21.1 and 21.3 to analogise the wine in the hold of a ship to amphorae of wine in a farmer's warehouse (apotheca79); just as a bag of thirty coins can be treated as two distinct entities of twenty and ten, so a shipful of wine can be treated as if it were distinct amphorae. Even if what is taken is part of a universitas, the wrongdoer's liability is determined by what he removes.80 This leads on to the final section of Ulpian's argument, 21.7-8.81 He 76 77 78 79

80

81

It seems to be assumed that the ship contains corn belonging to several owners. D.6.1.5/>r. (Ulpian, 16 adEdictum); cf. J.Inst. 2.1.28. D.41.1.7.8 (Gaius, rerum cottidianarum); J.Inst. 2.1.27. It is possible that apotheca is here used in contrast to horreum; the former would normally contain only one m a n ' s goods, whereas the latter would commonly be a public warehouse containing m a n y men's. M o r e probably, though, Ulpian is treating apotheca as the normal word for the storehouse of wine a n d horreum for the storehouse of grain: cf. D.30.47.1 (22 adSabinum); D.33.7.12.9 (20 ad Sabinum). See generally G . Rickman, The Corn Supply of Ancient Rome (Oxford, 1980), 138^43. We may be able to draw additional support for this conclusion from the contrast in form between 21 pr. ('in tantum eos furti actione teneri quantum abstulerunt') and 21.5 ('Et magis est ut et hie non totius dicamus'). The latter, perhaps, marks a strengthening of the conclusion. It is not merely that damages are assessed by reference to the amount abstracted; we would not even say that this was fur turn of the whole. '7. Qui furti faciendi causa conclave intravit, nondum fur est, quamvis furandi causa intravit. Quid ergo? Qua actione tenebitur? Utique iniuriarum: aut de vi accusabitur, si per vim introivit.' 8. 'Item si maioris ponderis quid aperuit aut refregit, quod tollere non possit, non est omnium rerum cum eo furti actio, sed earum tantum quas tulit, quia totum tollere non potent. Proinde si involucrum quod tollere non potuit solvit ut contrectet, deinde contrectavit quasdam res; quamvis singulas res quae in eo fuerunt tollere potuerit, si

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begins, summing up what he has said about the horreum and the apotheca, by making the seductively obvious point that entering a room with the intention of stealing does not in itself constitute furtum.82 Equally, if someone breaks open a chest which is too heavy to lift, he is liable for the furtum of such of the contents as he carries off, but not of the whole;83 breaking into a chest is essentially the same as breaking into a room. Similarly, though slightly less obviously, if he unstraps a bundle which is too heavy to lift, intentionally handles the contents and carries some of them off, this is furtum only of those that he takes;84 his liability is determined by what he removes. With the final sentence of 21.8 Ulpian ties together his whole argument, although not in a way to make his meaning immediately clear: Quod si totum vas tollere potuit, dicimus eum totius esse furem, licet solvent ut singulas vel quasdam tolleret: et ita et Sabinus ait. But if he could take the whole receptacle, we say that he is thief of all, even though he opened it to take one or some items; and so says Sabinus.85

This seems logically indistinguishable from the two cases just dealt with, yet the opposite result is reached; in consequence even such a conservative scholar as Buckland has agreed in the conclusion that the text has suffered badly at the hands of compilers who misunderstood what Ulpian was saying.86 If we think simply in terms of 21.8 itself, there is no doubt at all that this last sentence looks very odd indeed. But if we consider it in terms of the whole argument beginning at 21 pr. then its force becomes clearer.

82

83

84

85 86

tamen t o t u m involucrum tollere n o n potuerit, singularum rerum quas tulerit fur est, ceterarum n o n est. Q u o d si t o t u m vas tollere potuit, dicimus e u m totius esse furem, licet solvent ut singulas vel q u a s d a m tolleret: et ita et Sabinus ait.' See t o o Ulpian in D.47.2.39 pr. (41 ad Sabinum). T h e same point is m a d e by Paul in P.S.2.31.35 ( F I R A 2.356) a n d D.47.2.54/?r. (35 adedictum). T h e text h a d been treated by several c o m m e n t a t o r s as having been introduced from a wholly different context, b u t it is vigorously a n d convincingly defended by F . Raber, Grundlagen klassischer Injurienanspruche (Vienna, 1969), 152-9. 21 pr. (supra, p . 63). T h o m a s (Synteleia Arangio-Ruiz, 11.613) is clearly right t o suggest that w h a t is envisaged is the person w h o breaks open the box intending t o ransack it, but I d o n o t think it is necessary (or possible) t o assume from the text that the box is so heavy that he could n o t have contemplated moving it. C o m p a r e the analysis of D.47.2.22.1 (Paul, 9 ad Sabinum): if he handles the other things in the b o x with the intent to steal them, even if he does n o t carry them off, he commits furtum of them; if he handles them only t o move them o u t of the way of the object of his theft, it is not furtum. Ulpian would presumably n o t disagree even with the first case: the difference is that for Paul there is liability if the things were handled furti faciendi causa, while for Ulpian the bundle was unstrapped simply ut contrectet the contents. If I understand h i m rightly, his whole point is that contrectatio alone is insufficient. T h e translation is from the Pennsylvania edition of the Digest. 'Digest X L V I I . 2 a n d the M e t h o d s of the Compilers' (1930) 10 T.v.R. 117, 131-2. T o the same effect: Albanese, 23 Annali Palermo 156—9; T h o m a s , Synteleia Arangio-Ruiz, 11.613.

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The starting-point is Sabinus' assertion that the person who takes part of a universitas is liable for Xhtfurtum of the whole. Ulpian has cast doubt on this first (21.1-4) by showing that sometimes we must take into account the animus of the wrongdoer as determining not simply whether he stole but what he stole, and then (21.5-7) by showing that we cannot coherently conclude that a person who breaks into or breaks up a collection of objects which have been gathered together as a unity commits fur turn of the whole collection. Having thus weakened Sabinus' position by these flanking arguments, in 21.8 he attacks Sabinus head-on. The first two cases lead inexorably to the conclusion that the person who ransacks a container which he could carry off, but which he has no intention of taking, should only be liable for what he does in fact carry off. In starkly stating the contrary conclusion as Sabinus' opinion, he is not politely referring to the view of an earlier jurist but brutally if implicitly pointing out that it is wrong. 'Et ita et Sabinus ait', with its emphatically repeated 'et ... et', should be translated not simply as 'Sabinus says the same'87 or 'And so says Sabinus',88 but rather as 'But this is what Sabinus says.' Modo suo, he teases out the weak point in the opponents' position, and rips it to pieces.89 Even here, Ulpian does not resolve the tension between handling and carrying away. It cannot be resolved, since it is implicit in the opposition between the definition of fur turn as contrectatio and the conception of fur turn as taking away. Similarly, we can only point to the existence of the same tension in English law. The English world 'appropriation' does not have the overtones of physical touching which are associated with the Roman contrectatio, and in consequence English law has avoided some of the problems which had to be faced by the Romans. It is able, for example, to impose liability for theft in a case where one person holds himself out as owner of another's property and purports to sell it to a third party.90 In addition, since English law does not have to calculate damages by reference to the value of the thing stolen, it has not had to deal with the difficult problem of the theft or part of a universitas. Notwithstanding this, it is generally recognised that the courts' exegesis of the concept of appropriation has been 87 88 89

90

Jolowicz's translation. As in the Pennsylvania edition. T. Honore, Ulpian (Oxford, 1982), 81-2. Honore's comments o n Ulpian's treatment of D.24.1.32.14 could be applied equally t o the text we have been discussing: 'The structure is that of a dialogue between the a u t h o r and himself. H e asks himself a question, searches for the answer, suddenly finds the decisive reason, a n d pounces.' Pitham and Hehl (1976) 65 C r . A p p . R e p . 45. But see the severe criticisms of Williams, Textbook of Criminal Law\ 763-5.

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regrettably unclear and that the law today is something of an impenetrable forest.91 At the root of the difficulties lies the apparent conflict between the decisions of the House of Lords in Lawrence v. Metropolitan Police Commissioner92 and Burnside and Morris.93 In the former case D, a taxi-driver, was held to have been rightly convicted of theft when he had taken money in excess of the lawful fare from the wallet of a passenger; it did not matter that the passenger had proffered the wallet and hence consented to the taking. In the latter, D was held to have been rightly convicted of the theft of a joint of meat in a supermarket when he replaced its original label with one showing a lesser price, and then tendered this price at the supermarket check-out. In the course of his elaborate discussion of the concept of appropriation, Lord Roskill stressed that it involved an act which was not expressly or impliedly authorised by the owner, 'an act by way of adverse interference with or usurpation of [the owner's] rights'. 94 If there is a single concept of 'appropriation', 95 then there is clear conflict between these two decisions. In Lawrence the conviction was upheld notwithstanding that the owner consented to the taking; in Morris an act was said to constitute an appropriation if and only if the owner did not consent to it. Subsequent cases have striven to reconcile these decisions, but without signal success.96 No attempt will be made to do so here; the logicchopping involved should have no part to play in the criminal law. What is more interesting from a comparative perspective is why English law has managed to get itself into such a mess. Behind the conflict, it is argued, there is the same tension as we have seen underlying the Roman law, the tension between the definition of the minimal conditions which need to be satisfied in order to ground a conviction and the basic conception of the offence. 91 92 93

94 95

96

See, for example, the remarks of Griew, The Theft Acts 1968 and 1978, paras. 2-50. [1972] A . C . 626. [1984] A . C . 320 (hereafter referred to simply as Morris). T h e fundamental conflict between these decisions is explored at length, t h o u g h n o t satisfactorily resolved, in Gomez [1993] A . C . 442. [1984] A . C . 320 at 332. It has been argued that the Theft Act in fact contains two concepts of appropriation, o n e in s. 1 a n d one in s. 3; A . Halpin, 'The A p p r o p r i a t e A p p r o p r i a t i o n ' [1991] Crim.L.R. 426. While I a m sympathetic t o Halpin's general standpoint, I d o n o t think his specific argument withstands analysis; s. 1 provides the definition of theft, a n d ss. 2 - 6 thereafter clearly function only as a n elaboration of the five principal elements of the offence. See C. M . V. Clarkson, 'Authorised Acts a n d A p p r o p r i a t i o n ' (1992) 55 M o d e r n Law Review 265, 267 n. 14. Dobson v. General Accident Fire and Life Assurance Corporation pic [1990] 1 Q.B. 274; Gomez [1993] A.C. 442; Shuck (1992] Crim.L.R. 209; Rader [1992] Crim.L.R. 663 (all in the Court of Appeal).

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Morris is clearly a case of minimal conditions. The question was not what offence had been committed, but whether an offence had (yet) been committed. In this context appropriation has the same function for the English lawyers as contrectatio had for the Romans. This question can arise in a range of situations: when D has been interrupted in an apparently theftuous course of conduct;97 when D has undoubtedly stolen the goods by a series of acts beginning in England but only completed in a foreign jurisdiction;98 when the question is of the liability of secondary parties who only became involved at a late stage of the theftuous course of conduct;99 when D is charged with dealing with property which he has already dishonestly come by;100 or where there is a question whether D has committed one single theft or a number of distinct thefts which are required to be charged separately.101 In this context there are a number of good reasons why appropriation should be limited to acts which are not authorised by the owner. If appropriation involves 'an assumption of the rights of an owner'102 it is difficult to give this any real meaning when D's acts are precisely those which the owner has permitted; such acts do more to confirm the owner's rights then to assume them.103 If a theftuous course of conduct is held to involve a single act of appropriation, rather than a continuing act or a series of acts,104 then it makes good sense to ensure that so far as possible the appropriation should be held to occur at a time when it is possible to prove the other elements of the offence; this is best achieved by requiring that D's behaviour on its face raises the inference that he is stealing.105 97

98 99 100 101 102 103

104

105

McPherson [1973] Crim.L.R. 191 (shopper in supermarket placing goods in own shopping basket rather than basket provided by store: guilty); Monaghan [1979] Crim.L.R. 673 (supermarket cashier putting money in till but failing to ring up payment, intending subsequently to take money for self: guilty); Eddy v. Niman (1981) 73 Cr.App.Rep. 237 (shopper in supermarket putting goods in store's basket, intending not to pay for them: not guilty, but questionable in the light of Gomez). Morgan [1985] C r i m . L . R . 447, 596 (see Smith, The Law of Theft, (7th edn), para. 33 n. 33); Fritschy [1985] C r i m . L . R . 745; cf. Figures [1976] C r i m . L . R . 744. Meech [1974] Q.B. 549 {sedqu t h e application of the principle o n the facts of the case). Hircock (1978) 67 C r . A p p . R e p . 278. Skipp [1975] Crim.L.R. 114. Theft A c t s. 3(1); Morris [1984] A . C . 320, 321-2. Similarly it is argued that there must be a distinction between assuming the rights of another and invading the rights of another: L. H. Leigh, 'Some Remarks on Appropriation in the Law of Theft after Morris'' (1985) 48 Modern Law Review 167. There is an exact parallel with the Roman requirement that the contrectatio be invito domino. The law on this point is by n o means clear; academic writers prefer to see it as a continuing act (see, for example, Smith and Hogan, Criminal Law (7th edn), 512-13), but judicial authority is more equivocal. This is of particular importance in determining whether a store detective has a power of arrest: H . Levenson and F . Fairweather, Police Powers (2nd edn, London, 1990), 87-8; Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, s. 24(4), 24(5). Hence also the sense of the rule

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Moreover, as a matter of reality we do not normally regard someone as stealing (as opposed to preparing to steal) whose acts are apparently perfectly innocent. A case like Lawrence is very different. Where D has actually taken P.s property (assuming that he has acted dishonestly and with intent permanently to deprive P), there is a clear case of criminality. There may, legitimately, be a question of what offence he has committed, but there is no room for any doubt whether he has committed an offence. It is necessary therefore to face up to two distinct questions: (a) whether D.s conduct prima facie falls within the ambit of the offence of theft; (b) if so, whether the fact that he was clearly guilty of the offence of obtaining property by deception106 should preclude a conviction of theft. Both the Court of Appeal and the House of Lords were (rightly) of the opinion that the answer to the second question was in the negative.107 Hence the only question for resolution is the first; and it is hard to disagree with the conclusion that this is a perfectly clear case of appropriation, of taking another person's property, and that there is no warrant for reading into the statute a wholly artificial requirement that the taking be without the consent of the owner. The case is the English analogue of Buckland's hypothetical Roman question of inducing the hen to enter the henhouse;108 if we are satisfied that D has wrongfully obtained P's property, we do not need to look a great deal further into the definition of the offence. The same point is visible even more strongly in Dobson v. General Accident.109 Here the wrongdoer had deceived the owner of a watch and a diamond ring into parting with them in exchange for a worthless cheque; the question was whether this loss fell within the clause in P's insurance policy covering 'loss or damage caused by theft'. The obvious answer, reached by the Court of Appeal, is that it did; as a matter of the construction of an insurance contract, anything else would have been absurd. Similarly in two further recent cases, Shuck110 and Rader,xu the Court of Appeal has upheld convictions of theft where D has obtained -

106 107

108 109 110 111

that D's state of mind is one factor which determines whether his external acts constitute an appropriation. Theft Act 1968, s. 15(1). [1971] 1 Q.B. 373 at 377-8; [1972] A.C. 626 at 633. Equally the fact that he was no doubt guilty of a number of statutory offences was irrelevant. The Theft Acts are full of apparently overlapping offences; if they were held to be wholly distinct it would be all too easy for a person to escape conviction for one offence by arguing that he was guilty of another, perhaps more serious, one. See P. R. Glazebrook, 'Thief or Swindler: Who Cares?' [1991] C.L.J. 389. Supra, n. 52. [1990] 1 Q.B. 274. [1992] Crim.L.R. 209. [1992] Crim.L.R. 209.

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taken - P's property; it has been held not to matter that D's taking has merely been the opposite side of the coin to P's giving.112 The courts have in general attempted to analyse all these cases as if they dealt with the same problem, whether an appropriation can be said to have occurred when the owner of the goods consented to D's acts. When faced with a statutory definition of theft couched in terms of appropriation it is hard to see that they could have done othewise; yet in truth the two questions - whether an offence has been committed and what offence has been committed - are distinct, and it is by no means obvious that the answer to the first question should also provide the answer to the second. Roman law provides no easy answer to the English lawyers' problem. Nor should we expect it to do so. What can be learned, though, is that the problem stems not from the nature of the definition of theft but from the fact that it is being used to fulfil two functions. Ulpian's demonstration of the inadequacy of framing the question of liability simply in terms of contrectatio should lead us to recognise the parallel inadequacy of asking simply whether and when there has been an appropriation. The apparently conflicting answers of Lawrence and Morris can be reconciled; but only if we realise that they are answers to different questions. 112

The contrary line was taken in Gomez [1991] 3 All E.R. 394, but on appeal the House of Lords resolved in favour of the line in Lawrence, Shuck and Rader. [1993] A.C. 442.

5

Going to the fair - Jacques de Revigny on possession William M. Gordon

Having begun my studies in mediaeval Roman law under Peter Stein's supervision it seemed to me appropriate to turn to that subject in offering a tribute to him. Jacques de Revigny taught in the Orleans law school from around 1260 to around 1280, and the importance of that law school in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries is now well established, particularly as a result of the work of E. M. Meijers. The work which he began in the University of Leiden has been continued there under the leadership of R. Feenstra1 and attention has focused on the writings of Jacques de Revigny, which, so far as they had been printed before Meijers brought out their importance, had been printed under the names of others - Pierre de Belleperche in the case of his commentary on the Code and Bartolus in the case of his commentary on the Institutes.2 The modest addition to what has since been achieved by way of publication of his writings which follows has been made possible by association with the Leiden project. I gratefully acknowledge the help which I have received from Leiden in preparing it. The text edited is a commentary by Jacques de Revigny on D. 41.2.6.1-7, in the mediaeval form of reference, ff de acquirenda vel amittenda possessione l.Clam possidere § Qui ad nundinas and 1. Sed et si.3 1

2

3

See his collected studies, Fata Iuris Romani. Etudes d'histoire du droit (Leiden, 1974) and Le Droit savant au moyen age et sa vulgarisation (London, 1986), the latter of which contains at pp. 13-29 a review of researches on the law school of Orleans conducted since those of Meijers. For the Code see Meijers, Etudes d'histoire du droit, vol. m (Leiden, 1959), 72ff. and H. Kiefner, 'Zur gedruckten Codexlectura des Jacques de Revigny' (1963) 5 Tijdschrift voor Rechtsgeschiedenis 5; for the Institutes see Meijers, Etudes, 68ff. and L. J. van Soest-Zuurdeeg, La Lecture sur le titre De actionibus (Inst. 4,6) de Jacques de Revigny (Leiden, 1989). Ulpian, 70 ad edictum: 'Qui ad nundinas profectus neminem reliquerit et, dum ille a nundinis redit, aliquis occupaurerit possessionem, uideri eum clam possidere Labeo scribit: retinet ergo possessionem is, qui ad nundinas abiit: uerum si reuertentem dominum non admiserit, ui magis intelligi possidere, non clam.' Paul 54 ad edictum: 'Sed et si nolit in fundum reuerti, quod uim maiorem uereatur, amisisse possessionem uidebitur: et ita Neratius quoque scribit.' ('Suppose a man to go to market without leaving someone in charge and, while he is 73

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It is taken from a lectura on the Digestum novum of which the part from which this text comes is preserved in two manuscripts, one formerly held in Chartres and the other held in Paris.4 In his excellent study of the repetitiones of Jacques de Revigny5 Bezemer cautiously refrains from identifying the commentary on D.41.2.6.1-7 definitely as a repetitio, that is, as a ceremonial special lecture treating a text at length outside the regular course of lectures. Nevertheless he expresses a suspicion that it and other lengthy commentaries included in the lectura were in fact repetitiones, and he is perhaps unduly cautious in refusing to include this particular one. He points out that D.41.2.6.1-7 was the subject of a repetitio by another famous teacher at the Orleans law school, Pierre de Belleperche, which is preserved at Paris in the Bibliotheque Nationale, MS lat 4488 fos. 216r-219r.6 The Digest text is also described as intricate and subtle by Odofredus,7 is said by Albericus de Rosate to be regarded as subtle and difficult,8 and is called by Bartolus a notabilis et magistralis textus,9 all of which comments would indicate that it was appropriate for a repetitio. However this may be, the commentary is an interesting example of Jacques de Revigny's work. The structure of the commentary follows roughly the pattern of repetitiones of Jacques de Revigny as identified by Bezemer.10 This, as he notes, does not differ greatly from the structure of commentaries

4

5 6 7 8 9 10

returning from market, someone seizes possession; Labeo says that this person possesses by stealth, and so the man who went to market remains in possession; but if the trespasser does not admit the owner on his return, he is regarded as possessing by force rather than by stealth. But if the owner declines to return to his land because he fears superior force, he will be deemed to have lost possession. Neratius writes the same.') The text and translation are taken from The Digest of Justinian, Latin text edited by T. Mommsen with the aid of P. Krueger, English translation edited by W. A. J. Watson, vol. iv (Philadelphia, 1985), 506-7. The Chartres MS Bibliotheque Municipale 145 in which the text edited appears on fols. 91ra-92vb (= C in the edition) was destroyed during the Second World War. Fortunately some of the photographs of it held by E. M. Meijers have survived - see Meijers, Etudes, 11 n. *; the Paris MS Bibliotheque Nationale Latin 14350 (in which the text edited appears on fos. 83vb-84vb (= P in the edition) survives but is a less complete record. Another incomplete MS of the lectura is in Douai, Bibliotheque Municipale 648, and there are fragments in Paris MS BN lat. 4488 and Frankfurt-on-Main MS MPI 1 fos. 7-10. The edition in general follows C, which has been written by a more careful scribe. C. H. Bezemer, Les Repetitions de Jacques de Revigny (Leiden, 1987), at 239 n. 12. This repetitio makes a number of references, some critical, to Jacques de Revigny's commentary on the text, identified as scripta - see Meijers, Etudes, 95. Odofredus, In Digestum Nouum Lectura . . . (Lyons, 1552; reprinted in Opera Iuridica Rariora, IV), adh.l. (fol. 57va, no. 3). Albericus de Rosate, Commentaria . . . super Prima Parte ff noui . . . (Venice, 1585; reprinted in Opera Iuridica Rariora, XXV) adh.l. (fol. 81vb, no. 1). Bartolus, Commentaria in Primam Digesti Novi Par tern . . . (Lyons, 1552), ad h.l. (fol. 93ra) in principio. Les Repetitions, 6 1 - 7 1 .

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delivered in the normal run of teaching. The main difference lies in the greater emphasis on quaestiones, questions arising out of or in relation to the text being commented on. First comes the statement of the cases dealt with in D.41.2.6.1-7 - the casus positio (paras. 1-3). Three situations are identified. In the first, A has left his land to go to a fair, leaving no one on the land. In his absence B, 'an untrustworthy neighbour' in Revigny's description, has entered on the land. In the second situation, on A's return he is denied access to the land by B and in the third he is too afraid even to make an attempt to obtain access. According to Revigny the text lays down three propositions {dicta): first, that when B enters on the land he possesses secretly; secondly, that when B denies A access he now possesses by force and not secretly; and thirdly, that if A is afraid to return to his land he loses possession. Having set the scene in this way Revigny proceeds to discussion of the three propositions in paragraphs 4-21, 22-8 and 29-32 respectively. The first element in the discussion of the first proposition (paras. 4 and 5) is the wording of the text - why does it say that no one was left on the land, and why does it say that A 'therefore' retains possession when B takes possession secretly? This is an expositio literae, the part of a lecture, whether a normal or a special lecture, in which textual difficulties are disposed of. The explanation of the 'no one', attributed in the gloss to Jo(hannes), that is, Johannes Bassianus, is accepted. If anyone had been there, B would have acquired the whole possession if he had expelled him or nothing if he had failed to expel him. The gloss explains the 'therefore' on the basis that the words 'only naturally' are to be understood; what B acquires secretly is only natural possession. Revigny thinks it unnecessary to read anything into the text. A person possessing secretly is afraid of the person who is, and whom he believes to be, in possession, and so that person remains possessor. Revigny then raises a series of questions on the first proposition. They are concerned with the nature of the possession held by A and B respectively, civil or natural, and the remedy available to A to recover the land from B. The terminology of possession in the texts is notoriously difficult to disentangle, and it is by no means clear what is meant by civil and by natural possession. Revigny attacks the view of Johannes Bassianus that A has both civil and natural possession while on the land and civil possession only, meaning possession held animo, when he leaves, allowing B to take natural possession (paras. 7 and 8). He also attacks the view of Azo that natural possession means the possession of someone who is on the land or in sight of it or near it and is retained when one leaves (paras. 8 and 9). In his view civil possession means the possession of an owner, possession which he holds whether he is on the land or not, and

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natural possession means the possession held by someone who has the use of land (para. 9), for example a usufructuary (see para. 13);11 the person who enters secretly is like a usufructuary in that he holds the land although illegally (iniuste), but the illegality is irrelevant because possession can be held either legally or illegally (paras. 13 and 14). In each case only one possession is involved and the owner does not have a combination of civil and natural possession but a single civil possession which carries the benefit of natural possession. This gives him a right to claim the natural possession from someone who interferes with it as B has done in this case. The fact that he has this civil possession does not prevent someone from taking natural possession because possession is a matter of fact, but the taking is not to his prejudice (paras. 10 and 12). B has only natural possession, and a statement in the gloss that Ro(gerius) held that he had civil possession is perhaps a mistake (para. 15). Revigny then turns to the remedy available to A. First he disposes of an argument by quidam that the action will have to take place on the land because if B is summoned to a court at some distance he will lose his natural possession, which he holds only so long as he is on the land or near it or in sight of it. He has no doubt that B has to appear before the judge (para. 16) and will not lose the natural possession which he has by doing so. He rejects the conception of natural possession which gives rise to the difficulty, in particular as applied to moveables, where it seems to mean that natural possession of them is lost if they are not held or in sight (paras. 17 and 18). He also rejects the view of the gloss that the remedy available will be an interdict uti possidetis for recovery of possession as opposed to retention of it, in turn based on the view that A is suing for recovery of his civil possession, which is disturbed by B's retention of the natural possession (paras. 19 and 20). So far as Revigny is concerned A still has civil possession and does not need to recover it. He sues with the interdict uti possidetis, which is an interdict for retention of possession, to give effect to his right to have the land back, and he could sue even a bona fide possessor on this basis. Turning to the second proposition Revigny begins with questions (paras. 22 and 23), but these seem to be in essence an expositio literae. The questions are whether B possesses by force or secretly or by force and secretly, and if he possesses by force and secretly, whether he holds the same possession in these two ways. The gloss states that when the text says that B now holds by force and not secretly when he refuses A admission to 11

He even argues in para. 11 that if there is both an owner and a usufructuary and they each leave the land intending to retain possession, a third party coming in cannot have possession - he stands there like an ass because all the possession, both civil and natural, is already held, by owner and usufructuary respectively.

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his land it means that he holds by force and not only secretly and that he holds two possessions, the natural possession secretly, in the way he began, and the civil possession by force. B cannot have one possession held in two contrary ways. Revigny says, rather tartly, that he thinks one should stick to the text rather than the gloss and that B now holds one possession by force, the natural possession strengthened by ejecting the owner. Then, following the usual order of treatment in lectures, he disposes briefly of an apparently contradictory text (a contrarium) in para. 24, and embarks once more on questions. The first question is one raised by the gloss which argues that B would not be liable to the interdict unde vi if he turned A away but did not claim A's (civil) possession; Revigny firmly disagrees (para. 25). He disagrees even more firmly (para. 26) with the view of the gloss that A would require to bring two actions. The first would be the interdict unde vi to recover his civil possession from which he has been ejected; the second would be the interdict uti possidetis, which becomes available after he has recovered his civil possession, to deal with the disturbance of his civil possession by B's retention of natural possession - 'thus he reaches his goal with two actions, very laboriously' (para. 26, 11.42-3). This is rubbish. A can simply sue with the interdict unde vi to recover the civil possession which he has always had and which is held by force against him (para. 27). Uti possidetis is, however, available for the interim profits before his ejection (para. 28). Finally, Revigny turns to the third proposition which he deals with fairly summarily. He again begins with what is essentially an expositio literae explaining that he assumes possession is lost only where the fearful owner, A, has given up his intention of possessing and not where he chooses to bring an action rather than confronting B on the land (para. 29). Thereafter he discusses two questions, whether B would acquire civil possession if A gave up his intention of possessing even if B did not know of A's change of mind and what action there would be if B had entered on the land in good faith. On the first question he appears to agree with the gloss that B would acquire civil possession because he could be assumed to intend to acquire it if it were open to acquisition, this despite his differing view on what constitutes civil possession (para. 30). On the second question he rejects the use of the interdict unde vi if there was no intention to eject the owner (para. 31). He also rejects other suggestions - a remedy based on C.8.4.11; a suggestion that there is no remedy because A should not have given up his intention of possessing; a suggestion that there would be force with retroactive effect if B defended an action to recover the possession and Azo's suggestion of an extended interdict unde vi. For him there can be no action based on a supposition of

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the use of force. He suggests recourse to C. 11.48(47). 14, giving a summary remedy to the bona fide possessor of coloni until title to them can be established. It is not possible to assess the work of Jacques de Revigny on the basis of this relatively brief extract from his writings, but it is possible to gain some impression of his qualities. The Ultramontani had a reputation for constantly criticising the gloss. Chevrier12 has already shown that this did not mean that Jacques de Revigny had a policy of criticising it. He could accept views expressed in the gloss where he thought them well founded or merely suggest modification or correction, and instances of these attitudes can be found in the extract below, for example in paras. 4, 30 and 15. On the other hand Jacques de Revigny shows no particular respect for the gloss and is an unsparing critic where he thinks it clearly wrong, as in para. 27. It is not difficult to see how the Ultramontani gained their reputation when one reads the commentary as a whole. The picture which emerges is that of a man of incisive mind with a vigorous style, concerned to reduce the texts to a clear system and to provide from them practical and straightforward solutions to legal problems. It is much easier to understand why it is thought that his work should be restored to prominence in the history of mediaeval law than to understand how it fell out of sight. 12

G. Chevrier, 'Jacques de Revigny et la glose d'Accurse', Atti del Convegno Internazionale di Studi Accursiani. Bologna 21-26 Ottobre 1963, vol. in (Milan, 1968), 979ff.

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1. Casus: ego possideo fundum meum. Exeo de fundo meo, animo retinende possessionis semper, nemine relicto in fundo meo, et uado ad nundinas. Me absente quidam uicinus meus infidelis ingressus est fundum meum clam, nam si ego fuissem presens, pro oculo capitis non esset ausus intrare fundum. Queritur, quid iuris? Numquid ingressus possidet fundum meum? Dicitur quod sic: clam possidet. Ego autem retineo possessionem animo meo. 2. Set ponamus in casu secondo: ego intellexi quod uicinus meus est in fundo meo. Ego reuertor ad fundum meum. Dico ego sibi: domine, quid facitis hie? Exeatis fundum meum. Dicit ipse: ymo uos eatis, uos non intrabitis fundum. Dicit iurisconsultus: ego expulsus sum, unde ui possidet qui prius possidebat clam. 3. Set ponamus: ego scio quod uicinus meus est in fundo meo. Dico ego: non sum ausus ire ad fundum meum. Ipse crudelis est. Statim me expelleret. Ego, qui suspicatus sum me repellendum, amitto possessionem. Hoc dicit.

4. Dicit ergo hie: profectus ad nundinas neminem reliquit in fundo. Quare dicit, 'neminem reliquit'? Jo. dixit quod si aliquem reliquisset in fundo, dicit glosa,1 ille ingressus nullam possessionem sibi acquireret uel utramque sibi 5 acquireret; uerbi gratia, si ille clandestinus possessor ingrederetur fundum existente eo quern dominus dimisisset in fundo, nichil acquireret sibi ingressus, nam dominus animo suo habet ciuilem, item animo eius quern dimisit retinet naturalem et sic ingressus inueniret omne genus possessionis 10 occupatum, unde nullam sibi acquireret, ut infra eodem 1. Si coloni.2 Vel si ingressus expelleret eum quern dominus ibi 1

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dimisisset ingressus haberet omnem possessionem, nam expulso eo qui est in fundo meo, ego uideor expulsus arg. legis infra eodem 1. Peregre,3 in fine legis. 5. Dicit ergo hie: ingressus clam possidet. Retinet ergo possessionem qui ad nundinas iuit. Die michi: unde procedit illud 'ergo'? Dicit glosa,4 illud 'ergo' sequitur ex subaudito. Ingressus clam possidet, subaudi naturaliter tantum; ad illud subauditum refertur li 'ergo', ergo possessionem retinet etc. nam ingressus non habet omnem. Ego credo quod hec conclusio inferatur sine subauditione. Dico quod ille possidet clam qui metuit possessorem. Unde si ego ingredior fundum uacantem et timeo aliquem quern credo possessorem et non est, ego non possideo clam. Non enim inspicitur animus meus, quemadmodum si contrecto rem tuam te uolente in ueritate et ego te inuitum credam et sic in animo meo ego credo facere furtum, tamen ex quo tu uolens ego non sum fur, ut infra de furtis 1. Inter omnes § ult.5 Similiter dico hie: si ego ingredior fundum clam, credens eum possessorem, ego essem possessor clam, scilicet si ego timerem possessorem, ego essem possessor clam. Unde Jo. concludit: hie clam possidet, ergo credit alium possessorem.

6. Explicata litera, ego quero hie duo. Ille qui est extra possidet. Quero, quam possessionem habet? Item ille qui est ingressus possidet. Quero quam possessionem habet, et quomodo habeat? Iste tres questiones sunt literales. 5 7. Primam questionem uos habuistis. Sententia Jo. est quod ille qui egressus est habeat animo ciuilem. Unde dicit Jo.: dum modo ipse erat in fundo, ipse habebat ciuilem et naturalem. Si exit de fundo, ciuilem retinet animo, naturalem uero amittit et ideo naturalem uacantem potest 10 habere ingressus suo ingressu et ita dixit Jo. 8. Dominus Azo dixit quod egressus fundum possidet sicut possidebat dum erat in fundo et habet naturalem existens extra fundum, illam eandem quam habebat dum erat in fundo. Pro sua sententia inducit C. eodem 1. Licet6 et istam7 que 15 non distinguit possessionem. Item lex8 dicit, nulla possessio amittitur sine corpore et animo. Sequitur ergo secundum te, Jo., existens in fundo habebat ciuilem et 3 7

D.41.2.44.2 D.41.2.6.1.

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naturalem. Secundum te, si ergo exeo de fundo animo retinende possessionis, nullam possessionem amitto, nam nulla possessio amittitur sine animo et corpore. Ergo naturalis non amittitur solo corpore, ut infra eodem 1. Quemadmodum.9 9. Quid ergo dicemus? Ego dico quod egressus habet eandem possessionem quam habebat intra fundum, unde exeans de fundo non habebat nisi unam possessionem quam habebat dum erat intra, unde non dico sicut dixit Azo. Ipse dicebat quod dominus existens in fundo habet naturalem, et extra habet naturalem, et ego dico, quod ymo ille qui possidet fundum pleno iure iacens in fundo habet ciuilem, et extra fundum habet ciuilem eandem. Unde ego non dico, ut ipse dixit, quod naturalis sit ilia quam habet ille qui est in fundo, uel in conspectu fundi uel prope; ciuilis quam habet ille qui est extra fundum uel fundi conspectum uel fundi presenciam. Ymo dico ut iam dixi. Ciuilem habet ille qui non possidet, ut ille qui dominus est, naturalem habet ille qui possidet ad quern spectat rei utilitas. Unde isti modi possidendi non uariantur per intra et extra. Unde dico dominus, siue iacens in fundo siue extra fundum, semper habet ciuilem et iste § me urget ad hoc. 10. Ego ostendo quod existens extra fundum habet illam eandem quam habebat existens in fundo. Et Azo hoc dicit. Hie constat quod existens extra fundum non habet naturalem possessionem. Si haberet earn, ergo non esset uacans. Ergo ingressus earn non haberet. Ergo necesse est michi dicere quod dum est in fundo non habeat naturalem nee eciam extra. Hec est prima questio. Dico enim quod dum est intra et extra habet possessionem ciuilem et intelligo de eo qui possidebat fundum ut suum pleno iure. 11. Si nos intelligeremus casum huius § de fundo in quo habebat unus proprietatem et alter usumfructum, uerbi gratia, ego habeo in fundo usumfructum, tu proprietatem. Ambo eximus fundum, quilibet animo retinende possessionis sue. Tercius ingreditur fundum. Dico quod ipse stat ibi sicut asinus. Nullam enim habet possessionem, cum omnem inueniat occupatam. 12. Tu dicis michi quod ille qui possidet ut dominus pleno iure habet possessionem unam, que habet uim et effectum duarum possessionum, sicut ille qui dominus est pleno iure 9

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habet unum ius quod quidem ius habet utilitatem duorum iurium, scilicet ususfructus et proprietatis. Die ergo michi: quando iura sunt diuersa, quod unus habet proprietatem alter usumfructum, quilibet retinet suum ius. Quare ergo erit ita quod dominus dum est extra fundum retineat suum ius, quod habet effectum duorum iurium? Ymo uidetur arg. lex supra de hiis quibus ut indignis 1. Tutorem.10 Ego dico possessio plus habet facti quam habeat reale dominium uel ususfructus. Unde ego concedo, quod quando ipse est extra fundum ipse habet possessionem que ualet duas, et est tante efficacie quante est ilia possessio quam habet existens in fundo et dormiens. Unde quemadmodum est reperire dominium separatum ab usufructu, et dominium pleno iure quod habet secum utilitatem ususfructus, ille qui est dominus pleno iure suum dominium habet eque plenum dum est in fundo et dum est extra. Ita dico quod suum ius possidendi habet eque plenum, dum est in fundo et dum est extra. Tu non dicis uerum, nam secundum te ingressus nullam haberet. Dico quod ingressus nichil habet in preiudicium absentis domini, unde non est simile quantum ad hoc de dominio et de possessione, quia possessio plus habet facti quam dominium. Unde fructuarius usumfructum non potest habere nisi per me dominum, set possessionem quam habet fructuarius, tu potes habere me existente, non tamen in preiudicium meum. Unde totum ius et utilitatem meam ego retineo extra sicut intra. 13. Tu dicebas alia die quod ille possidet ciuiliter qui possidet rem ut dominus; ille possidet rem naturaliter qui possidet rem ut possidet ille ad quern spectat rei utilitas, et hoc bene dicebas de superficiario et emphiteota et similibus. Set quid dices de isto, nam ad istum qui ingressus est non spectat rei utilitas? Ego respondeo: uerum est, quod non habet rei utilitatem, set uerum est quod ipse possidet eo modo quo possidet fructuarius si esset in fundo. Iniuste tamen possidet. Nichil tamen ad rem, quia in summa possessionis non refert utrum sit iusta uel iniusta, ut supra eodem 1. iii § Econtrario.11 14. Vel aliter, et sic redit in idem. Die michi quare tu dicis quod iste ingressus possidet sicut fructuarius, et fructuarius sicut ipse? Quid commune habent inter se? Ego 10

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possum sic dicere: die michi quis primo possidet, proprietarius uel fructuarius? Certe proprietarius, nam fructuarius habet ius suum per constitutionem sibi factam a proprietario. Unde primo fuit proprietas et secundo ususfructus, nam ususfructus et seruitus communis habetur per constitutionem domini. Ergo dominus primo fuit quam esset fructuarius. Unde sicut in constitutione ususfructus, ego constituo tibi usumfructum et relinquo te in fundo et possides naturaliter, sic si ego exeo fundum et tu intras fundum, ego relinquo te in fundo. Unde propter istam similitudinem potest dici quod tu possides et fructuarius ad modum fructuarii. 15. Modo uidimus quam possesionem habet ille qui exit. Modo uideamus quam possessionem habet ille qui ingreditur. Dicit Ro., ut glosa12 sibi imponit, naturalem et ciuilem habet. Nos dicemus, quod ymo naturalem tantum. Ego nescio utrum glosa recitet hie infideliter sententiam Ro., nam supra eodem 1. iii Econtrario,13 glosa14 recitauit Rogerium dixisse, quod duo possunt possidere ciuiliter in certis casibus tantum, de quibus casibus iste non est unus. Sic ergo iste ingressus habet naturalem tantum. 16. Set queritur: die michi, si dominus qui est egressus uult agere contra ingressum, numquid potest, et quomodo potest? Verbi gratia, ponamus, ego fui ad nundinas. Reuersus intellexi quod quidam ingressus est fundum meum. Dico ego: non depono animum possidendi, turn ilium qui est in fundo meo ego faciam in iudicium euocari et agam contra eum. Die michi quomodo agitabitur illud iudicium. Dicunt quidam agitabitur in ipso fundo, nam ingressus habet solam naturalem, set si compelleretur uenire coram iudice, amitteret earn, nam ille habet naturalem possessionem, qui est in fundo, uel fundi conspectu uel in presencia. Si ergo recederet longe, usque ad locum iudicii, amitteret possessionem, et ipsi ideo dicunt iudex ueniet in fundo et ibi agitabitur^causa, arg. legis supra finium regundorum 1. Si irruptione § I.15 Nos dicimus, quod ymo ibit coram iudice, arg. C. de episcopis et clericis 1. Iubemus,16 in fine. Ergo secundum hoc, amittet naturalem possessionem, quia non est in fundo, nee uidet eum nee in presencia. 12 15 16

Gl. 'Clam' adh.l. D.10.1.8.1. C.l.3.37.

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17. Resp.: dicit glosa,17 naturalem amittit qui non est in fundo nee in conspectu fundi, subaudi qui habebat utramque possessionem, set ille qui non habet nisi naturalem, quocumque loco eat retinet, et probatur de fructuario, infra de ui et ui armata 1. iii § Unde ui interdictum.18 Quidam dicunt: fructuarius possidet iuste, et ideo si exeat fundum retinet naturalem, set ingressus possidet iniuste, unde exiens amittit earn. Dico non est uerum, nam in summa possessionis non refert sit iuste uel iniuste quesita, ut supra eodem 1. iii § Econtrario.19 18. Ego non possum ita respondere, nam ego dico quod nullus est qui non habeat nisi unam possessionem, unde ego dicam quod falsum dicunt. Azo dixit, quod naturalem habet ille qui est in fundo, uel in conspectu fundi uel in presencia, ciuilem habet ille qui non est in fundo, uel fundi conspectu uel in presencia. Dico, quod hoc non est uerum, nam ego non distinguo possessionem per intra et extra. Dixit ergo Azo: ille habet naturalem qui est in fundo, uel fundi conspectu uel prope, ueluti si fundus sit retro se. Quod uerum est in rebus immobilibus. Set in mobilibus dicit ipse, si non tenet nee uidet librum suum, amittit naturalem. Unde licet liber suus sit in presencia eius uel in custodia, si non tenet nee uidet, amittit naturalem et de hoc ego non credo ei, et de hoc habetis supra 1. iii § Nerua.20 19. Set quis libellus dabitur sibi? Resp.: dabitur sibi libellus in interdicto uti possidetis. Unde dicit sic: ego retineo possessionem fundi mei in animo meo. Tu turbas me in mea possessione et iniuste. Exi de fundo meo. Ego ostendo quod iste libellus non consuleret agenti interdicto uti possidetis, quod est retinende possessionis. Dicet ei ingressus: tu contendis de retinenda possessione. Quam possessionem habes tu? Dicet ille: ciuilem. De qua retinenda tu contendis, bene retineas. Ego non euro de ea. Habeas earn, quocumque loco ineris. Set scias quod naturalem quam ego habeo tibi non restituam. Dicit glosa:21 ingressus habet naturalem uiciose, scilicet clam, unde eo ipso quod tenet naturalem, turbat possidentem in sua ciuili, retinendo naturalem; unde interdictum uti possidetis erit in casu isto recuperande possessionis; unde compelleretur exire, nam turbatio cessat si exeat. 17 20

18 Gl. 'Naturaliter' adDAlAA pr. (?). D.43.16.3.13. 21 D.41.2.3.13. Gl. 'Non clam' ad hi

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20. Querit glosa 22 ultimo: tu dicis quod racio est hie, quod ille ingressus uiciose habet possessionem. Set ponamus, quod ingressus non habuit animum celandi possessionem, set habuit animum celandi quendam qui non possidebat, quern ipse credebat possessorem, et sic non habet uiciose possessionem a possessore. Ergo in causa ista non compelleretur restituere possessionem possessori. Dicit glosa, 23 quod ymo semper cogitur ei restituere possessionem, quia turbat eum in sua ciuili, retinendo naturalem. Pro glosa uidetur lex. 24 Lex dicit: ego edifico quendam locum tuum quern possides, habens animum celandi alium qui nullum ius habet. Numquid ego uideor fecisse clam quoad te? dicitur quod sic, infra quod ui aut clam 1. Aut qui § Si quis dum putat. 25 Et sic dicit glosa, 26 retinendo naturalem, turbat ciuilem, unde oportet eum exire. 21. Advertatis: ego non credo aliquo casu quod interdictum uti possidetis sit possessionis recuperande. Unde ego dico quod interdictum uti possidetis non erit interdictum recuperande possessionis. Si tu diceres quod agenti restitueretur possessio aliqua, iam sequeretur quod habeat duas possessiones. Ego autem, secundum me, non possum dicere quod ipse habeat nisi unam. Dico enim, quod eque possidet dum est extra fundum sicut dum est intra, unde non indiget restitutione possessionis. Quid ergo dicemus secundum me? Ego dico quod detentio quam habet ingressus, non facit eum possessorem; unde egressus habet unam possessionem, scilicet ciuilem plenam; unde ius habet, unde potest agere contra ingressum, ut ingressus qui est in fundo patiatur eum esse in fundo de facto, sicut sibi est ius ne turbet eum. Unde dicet sic: ego habeo ius eundi in fundo meo. Volo quod fiat michi facultas de facto detinendi, sicut michi est ius, et tu exeas. Et hoc est agere proprissime uti possidetis. Unde non est interdictum recuperande possessionis, set retinende possessionis. Unde ego non dico quod racio sit hie, quod clam ingressus est. Ymo et si esset ingressus bona fide, cogeretur exire ut fieret michi facultas detinende de facto, sicut michi ius est. Nam ego, quocumque loco sum, siue intra siue extra, habeo ius; unde ingressus compellitur exire, ut sic michi fiat facultas detinendi de facto et esse in fundo meo, sicut michi ius est. 22 24

23 Gl. 'Non clam' adh.l Gl. 'Non clam' adh.l. 25 26 D.43.24.5.5. D.43.24.5.5. Gl. 4Non clam' adh.l

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22. Hoc est uerum, quod in primo casu huius legis ingressus possidet clam. Modo ueniamus ad secundum dictum. Egressus uult uenire ad fundum suum. Dicit ingressus: certe uos non intrabitis, et sic me reuertentem non admisit. Possidet ui, non clam. Ego quero unum quod est contra literam: utrum ingressus possidet ui uel clam? Si tu dicis quod possidet ui, et non clam, tu omittis racionem legis. Lex dicit: origo adipiscende possessionis intuenda est. Ergo cum ab inicio possedit clam, adhuc possidet clam, ut supra hac eadem lege circa principium.27 Dicit glosa28 quod hie dicit possidet ui, non clam, subaudi tantum. Unde dicit glosa,29 quod dicit magis comparatiue, accipe, non electiue. Possidet enim ui et clam. 23. Quero ergo ultra: si possidet ui et clam, numquid eandem possessionem habet ui et clam? Dicunt quidam quod sic, arg. legis infra, quod ui aut clam 1. Is qui in puteum § Hoc interdictum.30 Glosa31 dicit contrarium. Ymo possidet unam ui, aliam clam, nam ui et clam contraria sunt. Unde non compatiuntur se in eadem possessione, quia posito uno de contrariis, remouetur et reliquum, ut supra de procuratoribus 1. Pomponius § Set et hiis32 et infra de exceptione rei iudicate 1. Inter me.33 Unde dicit glosa,34 naturalem habet clam, ciuilem ui, nam antequam dominus expelleretur, ingressus haberet naturalem et clam. Unde adhuc habet earn clam. Eo autem ipso quod dominum reuertentem non admisit, expulit eum. Unde ciuilem habet ui. Quid ergo dicemus? Ego non sum ausus dicere quod ingressus habeat duas possessiones. Quid ergo dices? Ego melius credo adherendum litere quam glose. Unde dicam quod possidet ui, et non clam. Quam ergo possessionem habet ui? Dico quod ipse possidet uno modo tantum. Set ponamus: quam habet post deiectionem domini? Illam quam habebat ante deiectionem. Unde prius habebat naturalem possessionem, post deiectionem non habet nisi unam possessionem, pleniori iure coadunatam. Unde dico quod ante deiectionem ingressus habebat unam possessionem, et dominus aliam. Domino deiecto, ista duo iura per coadunationem faciunt unum ius in 27 30 31 34

28 D.41.2.6 pr. Gl. ' N o n clam' ad hi D.43.24.11.5. 32 Gl. ' N o n clam' ad hi D.3.3.40.2. Gl. ' N o n clam'

29 33

Gl. 'Magis' ad hi D.44.2.15(?).

Jacques de Revigny on possession

87

persona ingressi, arg. supra si ususfructus petatur 1. Uti frui circa principium35 et supra quemadmodum seruitutes 40 amittuntur 1. Non satis36 in fine. 24. Ad literam istam opponitur et signatur contrarium. Dicit hie, quod qui non admittit dominum reuertentem, possidet ui. Lex dicit contrarium in eisdem terminis infra de usucapionibus 1. Sequitur § Si occupaueris.37 Dicendum 5 est: ibi loquitur de eo qui ingressus est fundum uacantem animo et non corpore.

5

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20

25

25. Glosa38 mouet hie unam questionem. Ponamus: ille non admittit dominum reuertentem et dicit: amice, tu non introibis et scias quod possessionem quam tu habes, ego uolo scilicet te habere. Modo querit glosa:39 ex quo ingressus non curat habere possessionem quam absens habet, numquid in casu isto agetur interdicto unde ui? Dicit glosa40 quod non, et male dicit. Inducit legem contrariam, infra de usucapionibus 1. Non solum § Si dominus.41 Lex ilia dicit: ego te expello de facto. Possessionem non apprehendo. Fundus tuus non est ui possessus, nam hie, ex quo ingressus expulit dominum et animo non apprehendit possessionem domini, non possidet. Ego dico, quod etiam ubi ingressus non possidet, glosa haberet apparenciam. Set dico quod ubi possidet, alius non possidet. Eciam glosa non potest deffendi, quin ingressus teneatur interdicto unde ui. Lex enim dicit: ego deicio te de fundo tuo, non apprehendendo possessionem. Ego non possideo ui, et tamen teneor interdicto unde ui, ut infra de usucapionibus 1. Sequitur § Si tu me.42 Quid ergo dicemus in ista questione? Ego dico quod ex quo non patitur dominum intrare et detinet de facto, uidetur eum deicere, ex quo non patitur eum uti sua possessione et oportet dominum recedere et deponere animum possidendi. 26. Set queritur. Ponamus: ille qui exiuit de fundo suo reuersus est ad fundum suum. Non est admissus, unde deiectus est. Quomodo aget contra deicientem? Dicit glosa43 quod aget duobus iudiciis. Aget enim primo iudicio 35 39 42 43

36 37 D.I.6.5 pr. D.8.6.6. D.41.3.4.27(28). G l . ' N o n clam' ad h.l. «° Gl ' N o n clam' ad h.l. D.41.3.4.22. G l . ' N o n clam' ad h.l.

38 41

G l . ' N o n clam' ad h.l. D.41.3.33.2.

William M. Gordon

30

35

40

45

50

55

60

65

recuperande possessionis, secundo agit retinende possessionis. Verbi gratia: clam ingressus habet ab inicio naturalem, et dominus ciuilem. Quando ingressus non admittit dominum reuertentem ad fundum suum, ipse deiecit eum de sua ciuili, et ideo dominus, quia non possidet, non habet interdictum uti possidetis. Habet ergo interdictum unde ui. Set ad quid? Ad possessionem de qua fuit deiectus, scilicet ad ciuilem, nam de ciuili fuit deiectus. Unde aget ante interdicto unde ui, ut restituatur ciuilis de qua fuit deiectus. Ciuili habita, possessor est, et ex quo habet ciuilem in sua ciuili turbat eum ingressus, retinendo naturalem; unde, recuperata ciuili per interdictum unde ui, adhuc non recedet ingressus; unde dominus aget interdicto uti possidetis contra ingressum, ut recedat de fundo et restituat ei naturalem; et sic ad intentionem suam perueniet duobus libellis, multum laboriose. 27. Ego miror quomodo ipsi dicunt, quod restitueretur sibi ciuilis. Die michi, reponetur-ne sibi in animo primo ciuilis? Ego bene dicerem pro eis unam trupham. Dico tamen, quod restituatur sibi possessio ut possideo animo. Non est res magne apparencie. Unde dico ego, quod non est dicendum ut ipsi dicunt, nam iste est circuitus et circuitus uitandus est, ut supra de condictione indebiti 1. Dominus.44 Quid ergo dicemus? Dico: uisa mea prima positione, patet quid sit dicendum. Dico enim quod aget recta uia interdicto unde ui ut restituatur sibi possessio omnis, et istud sequitur ex premissis necessario. Dico quod ingressus qui dominum deiecit, non habet nisi unam possessionem; unde illam quam prius habebat clam, modo habet ui. Idem deiectus tempore deiectionis, et in omni tempore, habuit eandem possessionem. Unde deiectus aget interdicto unde ui ut restituatur ilia possessio qua fuit deiectus, que semper fuit una et intra et extra. Set ingressus post deiectionem habuit pleniorem possessionem, illam eandem possessionem quam prius habebat minus plenam. Contra; origo possessionis inspicitur, ergo non potest esse quod illam quam habebat clam, habeat ui. Dicendum est illud: uerum est nullo extrinsecus accidente. Set deiciendo enim dominum enim accedit extrinsecus, et probatur supra eodem 1. iii § Illud45 adfinem§. Sic ergo uidetis, si non 44

D.12.6.53.

45

D.41.2.3.19.

Jacques de Revigny on possession

89

admittatur, uidetur deici, et habet interdictum unde ui pro recuperanda possessione, et sufficit sibi illud interdictum. 70 28. Set queritur, numquid et post deiectionem habet interdictum uti possidetis? Ego credo quod sic hie, pro utilitate medii temporis quod cucurrit ante deiectionem, nam utilitas preterite turbationis non uenit in interdicto unde ui; unde datur sibi interdictum uti possidetis ut infra uti 75 possidetis 1. Si duo 46 ad finem et supra de usufructu 1. Quesitum47 ad finem, et sic intelligo glosam48 que obscure loquitur in suo fine.

5

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15

20

25

29. Modo ueniamus ad ultimum dictum. Dominus meticulosus, timens se repellendum, non uenit ad fundum. Possessionem amittit. Quod ego intelligo, ubi deponit animum possidendi. Unde ponamus quod egressus est quidam bonus homo, qui execratur lites et maluit procedere per iudicem. Semper tamen habet animum retinendi possessionem. Nam tucius est procedere per iudicem, ut infra de solutionibus 1. Si stipulatus. 49 Ego non dicerem eum amisisse possessionem, quemadmodum ille qui nunciat uerbo tenus amittit possessionem; ille qui nunciat per pretorem non amittit possessionem, ut supra de operis noui nuntiatione 1. De pupillo § Meminisse50 et supra eodem titulo 1. i § De operis.51 30. Set queritur: tu dicis quod absens suo animo habet ciuilem, ingressus naturalem. Ponamus: absens, ignorante ingresso, deponit animum possidendi. Mode quero, numquid ingresso, et ignoranti, acquiritur possessio ciuilis? Dicit glosa52 quod sic, non per ius accrescendi, nam ius accrescendi accedit saltim inuito in hereditatibus. Die michi ergo, quare differtur sibi possessio? Dicit glosa:53 quia ab inicio dum ingressus est fundum, presumitur habere animum quod uellet habere ciuilem si esset uacans, quia sine animo nulla est possessio, infra 1. proxima. 54 31. Set queritur ultra, et illud est hie necessarium. Absens possidet animo, ingressus corpore. Ponamus: absens, ignorante ingresso, deponit animum possidendi. Ingressus bona fide ingressus est. Quid remedium dabitur absenti contra ingressum? Numquid interdictum unde ui? Non 46 50 51 54

D.43.17.3. D.39.1.5.10. D.39.1.1.6. D.41.2.8.

47 52

D.7.1.37.

48

Gl. ' N o n clam' adh.l

G l . 'Amisisse' adh.l

53

G l . 'Amisisse'

49

D.46.3.81.

adh.l.

90

William M. Gordon

30

35

40

45

50

uidetur, quia non est deiectus, nam uoluntas distinguit maleficia, et certe, ingressus bona fide ingressus est, nee habebat animum deiciendi egressum. Nam si haberet animum deiciendi dominum si uenerit, ego concederem quod teneretur interdicto unde ui, arg. infra de furtis 1. Si quis ex domo55 et 1. Qui iniurie.56 32. Quid ergo remedium dabitur sibi eo casu? Dicunt quidam: dabitur sibi remedium per legem C. unde ui 1. Querebatur.57 Dicunt alii: nullam habebit remedium. Miser est et miser erit. Dampnum quod quis sua culpa sentit;58 de se ipso queri debet, quare deposuit animum possidendi. Dominus Azo admisit in casu isto, quod detur sibi interdictum utile unde ui, nam licet non deiecit eum, tamen occasione sui egressus amisit possessionem; unde tenetur ei interdicto unde ui utili de eo quod ad eum peruenit, arg. infra de ui et ui armata 1. i § Familie59 et Si quis tamen se,60 et de hoc habebitis in eodem titulo 1. iii § Si quis autem uisis armatis.61 Dicunt alii: uerum est quod ingressus non deiecit eum, set si contenderet de possessione et non admitteret eum, ille actus retro traheretur, et uideretur eum deiecisse, arg. infra de itinere actuque priuato 1. i § Si quis propter,62 supra ad Macedonianum 1. Set Julianus § Proinde.63 Ego non uideo per quam uiam iste habet interdictum unde ui, ubi ingressus non habuit animum deiciendi eum, set dico ei consulendum per legem que dicit, celeri reformatione succurrendum possessori ut C. de agricolis et censitis 1. Si coloni.64 55 59 60 64

D.47.2.53(52). D.43.16.1.18. D.43.16.1.19. C.I 1.48(47). 14.

56 61

57

D.47.2.54(53). D.43.16.3.6.

62

C.8.4.11.

58

D.50.17.203.

D.43.19.1.9.

63

D . 14.6.7.12(7).

Jacques de Revigny on possession 1 2 3 5-6 10 11 12

91

13 14 17

ETC om. P meo om. P quidam] quia C ac clam - fundum om. P meo om. C ponamus] po(ne) P in secundo casu tr. P meus om. C in fundo meo est tr. P Ego reuertor] uenditor uenit C meum om. C facitis] facis P exeatis] exeas P dicit - fundum om. P (homoiotel.) ponamus] pone P quod uicinus om. P

1 2 3 4 6 7 7-8 8 12-13 13 14 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 26-7 27 29 31-2 32

Dicit] Dico C om. P dicit] dixit C reliquit - quod] i.e. 1. quid adeo dixit quia P in fundo om. P sibi possessionem tr. P fundum bis scr. P ingressus - dominus om. P animo suo tr. P habet om. P expulso eo] expellendo eum P arg. legis om. P legis om. P ergo] hie praem. C refertur] infertur C ego] ergo P inferatur] refertur P metuit possessorem] uetuit pos(essionem) P quern om. P possessorem] pos(essionem) P non] nemo P rem tuam] rem meam tuam C ac uolente in ueritate - credam] nolente inuito te et ego te inuitum P credam] C 2 marg. facere om. P § ult.] penultimo C 2 marg. scilicet - clam om. P Jo.] non P

I 5 6 I1 12-13

quero] extra(?) add. P questionem] questiones P a c egressus] ingressus C ac dixit] dicit P et habet - in fundo om. P {homoiotel.)

92

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14

istam (?) que] ista questio P que] scilicet sic intelligit praem. C 2 marg. exeo]exitP amitto] amittit P ut om. P egressus] ingressus C ac P intra] utrum(?) P exeans de] existens in P C ac exeans C 2 marg. de C 2 inter. intra] in fundo uel praem. P non om. P dixit ] dicit P dominus om. P et extra] ymo ille qui possidet fundum praem. P a c sit bis scr. C prope] proprie P quam] est praem. P est extra] e P conspectum] conspectu P iam om. P ciuilem] nam praem. P qui possidet om. P uariantur] uariatur P quod] §(?) P habet - extra fundum om. P {homoiotel.) michi om. P habeat] habet P hec est - intra et extra om. P {homoiotel.) casum] conversum P in fundo tr. P post usumfructum uim et om. P sicut] non praem. P ius] inde C ususfructus et proprietatis] usumfructum et proprietatem P iura] iussa C alter] alius P ius suum tr. P dico ego tr. P reale] realem C quando] quandoque(?) C est ipse tr. P que ualet - possessio om. C {homoiotel.) in fundo om. P quod habet] habet praem. P a c secum - pleno iure om. P {homoiotel.) habet om. C eque plenum] earn plenam P ius scr., om. C. ita dico - est extra om. P {homoiotel.) Tu non scr.: tuum C om. P

18 19 21 22 23 25 26 28 30 31 31-2 32 33 34 36 39 39-41 43 44 45-6 48 50 56 57 58 59 60 61 65 66 67 67-8 69 71 71-2 72 73 73-5 75

Jacques de Revigny on possession 79 80 85 86 87 88 90 92 95-6 97 99-100 102-3 105 108 110-11 114 115 117 118 119 121 123 125 125-6 126 127 130-1 131 133 137 140 143 144 147 148 149 150 151-2 153

93

fructuarius] usufructuarius P usumfrue turn om. P dominum] dominium P possessionem] posseossionem C rem naturaliter] rem om. P ut possidet] possidet om. P hoc] hie C emphiteota] emph(yteuta)rio P Set om. P nam] non P non habet - quod om. C (homoiotel.) tamen possidet] earn possidet P dicis tu tr. C Quid commune habent] qui habet commune P Certe - fructuarius om. C {homoiotel.) nam ususfructus - constitutionem] et seruitus communis habetur constitutione P usumfructum om. C fundo] fundum P et] ut(?) exit - qui om. P {homoiotel.) nam]utC recitauit] recitat P Rogerium] C 2 Ro. C P casibus om. P tantum] habet P egressus] ingressus P ponamus] po(ne) P ilium] ille P michi om. P agitabitur] agebatur P illud iudicium om. C. Dicunt quidam agitabitur] P Uidetur quod in ipso fundo quidam(?) C 2 marg. in fundo ipso tr. P set] qui C marg. compelleretur uenire] compelletur ire P amitteret] etpraem. P ideo dicunt ipse tr. P ueniet] ueniret P agitabitur] agitabatur P ibit] ibi P qui]quiaP eat] exeat P unde] et ideo P in] spraem. P a c possum - respondere] non ita respondeo P non om. C unam om. P Azo] Az. P alias est Jo. C 2 marg. uel in presencia om. C ciuilem - in presencia om. P {homoiotel.) Azo] alias Jo. C 2 interl.

94

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154 157 160 161 161-2 162 163 164 165 165-6 167 168 169 170 172 173 174 176 183-4 185 186 189 191 194 196 197 199 201 206 207 208 209 211 212 214 215 216

fundi conspectu] in conspectu fundi P naturalem] naturaliter P licet] liber praem. C ac ei om. P sibi? Resp. om. P libellus dabitur sibi tr. P dicit sic] die si P in animo meo] immobilis P Tu] set praem. P possessione om. C Exi] et praem. P ostendo] ostendi P agenti] agentem C interdicto - quod] interdictum uti possidetis P retinenda] restituenda C habes tu?] habetis P bene retineas] unde ne timeas P ineris] meus C scias scr.\ sciam C om. P naturalem] ciuilem praem. P tenet naturalem] retinet corporalem P ciuili om. P interdictum om. P erit om. P exeat] extatP possessori - possessionem om. P (homoiotel.) eum]eamP a c lex] quod P 1. Aut qui] 1. Aut qui aliter P unde oportet] post ciuilem C lacuna eum] Azo praem. C erit interdictum] interdictum om. P aliqua] aliquam P sequeretur] iam om. C me non] eum P sicut] et P intra] in fundo P unde om. P detentio] detentatio P dicet] dicit P eundi] exeundi P C a c quod] quidem C exeas] exiens P Et om. P recuperande] retinende C sit] sic C est michi ius tr. P sum] earn P siue intra] siue om. C compellitur] compelleretur P sic michi fiat] sit michi P esse]etiamC

6 6-7 1

possidet] possideat P Si tu - clam om. P (homoiotel.) omittis racionem legis] committis in legem P racionem] C 2 marg. inCac

Jacques de Revigny on possession 9 11 13 16 17 19 20 21-2

95

23 26 27 29-30 31 31-2 32 33 34 35 36

possedit] possiderit (?) C eadem om. P subaudi om. P et]nonP Is qui] C 2 marg., om. P Glosa dicit] Clam die C dicit C ac non] C 2 /«ter/. quia] nam P et] in C ac de exceptione - Inter me] de re iudi(cata) si mea P Inter me scr.\ Si mei C ui nam om. P eum] earn C ac unde] C 2 interl. ut C quod] quidem C quod - dico om. P (homoiotel.) ipse om. P quam - deiectionem] quod habet prius adfectionem P illam] quam praem. C ac possessionem om. P nisi om. P, add. C 2 mter/. pleniori] pleniorem C coadunatam scr.\ coadunatio c ordinatam P quod om. C et om. P

1 4

opponitur bis scr. P contrarium add. C2 marg. usucapionibus] usur(pationibus) P Sequitur] C 2 marg. P, Seius

Cac

5 6

est om. C loquitur om. C non om. C

1

mouet] monet C Quaestio add. C2 marg. ponamus] pone P ille om. P admittit] amittit C et dicit] et om. P introibis] intrabis P scilicet te habere] C2 marg., om. P contrariam om. P infra om. C de facto] C2 marg., om. P nam] ita P animo om. P non] C2 interl. domini] dominum P non om. P etiam quod tr. P alius] alium C non om. C glosa eciam tr. P apprehendendo] apprehendo Cac P teneor] tenetur P de usucapionibus] unde ui P oportet om. P

2 3 4 7 9 10 11 12 14 16 17 18 22

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William M. Gordon

24 28 31 32 36 37 38 40 42 44 45 46 47 48 50 51 53 54 59 60

Ponamus] po(ne) P Quaestio add. C2 marg. agit om. P admittit] C2 admit C admisit P dominus om. C interdicto] interdictum C ut] aut Cac possessor] pos(sessione) praem. P et om. P retinendo] C2 interl. ueniendo C adhuc] aut restituatur ciuilis de qua fuit deiectus praem. Cac perueniet] uenient P restitueretur] restituetur P primo] prima P bene om. P disce add. C post tamen ego om. C uitandus] uitantus P prima om. P unde ui interdicto tr. C istud] illud P qua] e praem. P semper fuit] superfluit P illam eandem possessionem om. P (homoiotel.) est illud om. C accidente] aduemente te P enim om. P accedit] accedat P extrinsecus] extrinsecum C et] ut P ad finem §] §fi.P admittatur] amittatur P et] etiam P credo] concedo P quod] quidem C hie om. P cucurrit] incurrit P interdicto] interdictum C suo] sui C

61-2

64 54 66 67 68 70 71 72 73 77 1 2 3 4 5 7

8 9 10

ueniamus ad] uideamus P timens] timet P quod om. P quod om. P maluit] mauult P solutionibus scr.\ usu(capionibus) C P Si] sti(?) praem. P stipulatus] stipulatur P amisisse] amittere P quemadmodum] quandam C nunciat] uenit C nunciat] ueniat C non om. P

Jacques de Revigny on possession 10-11 11 12 13 14 16 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 29-30 32 34 35 37 37-8 38 39 40 41 43^ 45 46 47 49 50 51 53

97

noui operis tr. C supra scr.\ infra C P titulo om. C queritur om. P Ponamus] po(ne) P ignoranti] ignorante C ac in] Qt praem. P quare] queritur P differtur] differatur P fundum] in praem. P quod] quia P uellet] C 2 inter I. nellet C est om. P ultra] utrum P Ponamus] po(ne) P absens om. P egressum - deiciendi om. P (homoiotel.) domo] domi P eo casu om. C sibi om. P quod bis scr. C sentit sua culpa tr. P queri] conqueri P quare] queritur P Azo] Az. P deiecit] deiecerit P egressus scr.\ ingressus C om. P amisit] admisit P a c et Si quis tamen se] C 2 marg., om. P autem uisis] C 2 marg. iure C, del. C 2 uiris P contenderet de possessione] concederet eum de pos(sessione) C de del. (?) C 2 post pos. add. s(ess)orem C 2 interl. admitteret scr.: amitteret C P eum om. P retro] secus P i §] C 2 interl, om. P Proinde scr:. p. C p(enultimo) P habuit] habet P celeri scr.: sceleri C P succurrendum] ei consulendum siuepraem. P ut om. C C. scr.: infra C P

Bembo giureconsulto? Michael H. Crawford

When Antonio Agustin arrived in Rome in the autumn of 1544, followed in the spring by his friend and collaborator Jean Matal, he had already formulated the amazing project of a corpus of the sources of civil and canon law; he was already the author of the Emendationum et Opinionum Libri IV and the Ad Modestinum, the fruit of his work on the Florentine manuscript of the Digest; and he had begun work on the De Legibus et Senatus Consultis.1 Central to the activity of the two in Rome was a continued search for manuscript copies of imperial constitutions and novels; but they also devoted a great deal of time and energy to an attempt to collect and arrange in order reliable copies of the inscriptions of the Roman world, which could furnish evidence for the Roman institutions which had produced the legal texts on which they worked. Much of the material which they collected survives to reveal their methods of work, which attached high importance to the verification of copies against stone or bronze and to the assembly of parallels from juristic and literary texts: 2 an annotated copy of Epigrammata Antiquae Urbis (Rome, 1521), now in the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Vat.Lat. 8495; and a series of notes and drafts for an epigraphic sylloge, which form part of five later miscellanies, MSS. Vat.Lat. 6034 and 6037-40. One of these, MS Vat.Lat. 6039, contains a curious text, in the form of a decree of the senate of Renaissance Rome. Petri Bembi Cardinalis Quod Curtius Fregepanius, Tiberius Marganius, Jo. Petrus Draco, Consules3 de Q. Fabio et Theophrasto Rullis Lupi filiis posterisque eorum civitate donandis verba fecerunt, D(e) E(a) R(e) V(niversi) I(ta) C(ensuerunt). Cum Rullorum gens urbe Roma oriunda, ob Agrariae legis invidiam olim premeretur quam P. Servilius Rullus trib(unus) pleb(is) promulgasset, cumque propterea nonnullorum 1

2 3

See J.-L. Ferrary, Correspondence de Lelio Torelli avec Antonio Agustin et Jean Matal 1542-1553 (Como, 1992), introduction; J.-L. Ferrary, 'La Genese du De Legibus et Senatus Consultis\ in M. H. Crawford (ed.), Antonio Agustin between Renaissance and CounterReform (London, 1993). R. C. Cooper, 'Epigraphical Research in Rome in the Mid-Sixteenth Century: The Papers of Antonio Agustin and Jean Matal', in Crawford (ed.), Antonio Agustin. Here and at the end Matal has wrongly expanded cons as consules instead of conservatores.

98

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potentiae cedendum sibi esse potius decreverit quam propter civium dissensionem Rempub(licam) in discrimen adducere, ac Lupiam antiquissimam et nobilissimum (sic) magnae Graeciae oppidum se contulerit, ibique splendide semper ac honorificentissime vixerit, cum postremo Q. Fabius et Theophrastus, optimae indolis magnaeque spei adolescentes, ut civitati longo intervallo restituerentur magnopere petierint: His de rebus senatum existimare Rullae genti civitatis ius quod illius nobilitati splendori egregiaeque in Rempub(licam) voluntati debeatur quasi postliminio reddendum restituendumque esse, atque etiam si res ita postulet de integro condonandum; senatuique placere uti Q. Fabius et Theophrastus fratres posterique eorum Romanae civitatis immunitatibus, privilegiis, beneficiis, honoribus frui ac fungi omnibus possint utique cives patritiique Romani eodem iure sint perpetuoque futuri sint, quo sunt qui cives patritiique iure Optimo esse censentur. Qui impedierit, senatum existimaturum eum contra Rempub(licam) fecisse. Hanc autem s(enatus) c(onsulti) auctoritatem iidem consules V. Id. Januar. perscribendam curarunt Anno a Christo nato MDXLII. (Vat.Lat. 6039, fol. 335r (Matal's numbering) = 11 l r (modern numbering)

The fact that the grant of citizenship is not to be found in the list of grants drawn up by F. Gregorovius on the basis of the archives is not in itself significant.4 The same is true of numerous other grants attested by other sources: Montaigne, mentioned by Gregorovius; but also Mariano de Blanchellis de Leonardi of Palestrina, about 1510;5 Giovanbattista Paladino, by 1538;6 Jacopo Strada; Camillo Capranica, by 1547;7 Carlo Gualteruzzi, in 1564 (see below). The list could no doubt be much lengthened. There is nothing mysterious about the proposers, Curzio Frangipane, Tiberio Margani and Giovanni Pietro del Drago. The first came from one of the oldest families of the Roman nobility, even if we decline to follow Onofrio Panvinio in tracing it back to the Anicii of the Late Empire; the family was closely tied to the Farnese; Curzio and his twin brother Mario were together responsible for the funerary monument of their father Antonio in 1546;8 he himself held the office of Urbis cancellarius in 1545 and died in 1554;9 and his brother Mario was his coadiutor and was then the holder of that office himself, when Panvinio dedicated De Gente 4

5 6 7 8

9

'Alcuni cenni storici sulla cittadinanza romana', Memorie dell'Accademia dei Lincei, Serie Terza, Cl.Sc.Mor. 1 (1876-7), 314-46 = 'Romische Biirgerbriefe seit dem Mittelalter', Kleine Schriften zur Geschichte und Cultur, vol. I (Leipzig, 1887), 265-323. P. A. Petrini, Memorie prenestine disposte in forma di annali (Rome, 1795), s.a. J. Wardrop, 'Civis Romanus sum. Giovanbattista Paladino and his Circle', Signature, n.s. 14(1952), 3-39. Bodleian Library, MS Auct.S. 10.25, fol. XVF; see M. H. Crawford, 'Benedetto Egio and the Development of Greek Epigraphy', in Crawford (ed.), Antonio Agustin. V. Forcella, Inscrizioni delle chiese e d' altri edificii di Roma dal secolo XI fi.no ai giorni nostri (2 vols., Rome, 1869, 1873), vol. II, p.306, no. 945; O.Moroni, Corrispondenza Giovanni della Casa Carlo Gualteruzi (1525-1549) (Vatican City, 1986), no. 196, p. 322, for the news of the death of Antonio; cf. p. 76 n. 5. Moroni, no. 50, p. 110; Forcella, vol. II, p. 535, no. 1610.

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Fregepania Libri Quatuor to him on 1 May 1556.10 The second came from a less distinguished, but none the less notable, family.11 The last is himself attested in 1558 and 1559, and his son (presumably) is attested as conservator in 1584.12 I know of no independent attestation of the three as conservatori in 1542;13 but it is surely easier to suppose that the three were conservatori and that the decree was passed in their names in 1542 than that they were all parties to an elaborate joke. For their names would surely not have been invoked without their knowledge and consent. Comparison of our decree with those for Giovanni Vitelleschi of 1436, Cardinal Otto Truchsess of 1560 and Carlo Gualteruzzi of 1564 makes a number of things clear. In nomine etc. . . . Ad laudem, gloriam et honorem omnipotentis Dei . . . ac aeternam memoriam Joannis de Vitelleschi . . . congregatis, et coadunatis insimul et ad invicem, in Domibus solitae residentiae magnificorum D. D. Conservatorum Camerae Almae Urbis apud Capitolium et Aracaeli situatis, Magnificis Viris [the names of three conservatores and 69 others follow] propositoque per supradictum Laurentium alias lo Mancino primum Conservatorem quid agendum foret circa mirabilia gesta invictissimi Patriarchae . . . praedictus magnificus Laurentius alias lo Mancino Conservator praedictus pro ipsius Collegis et toto Conservatoratus officio laudibilia et fortia gesta praedicta D. Patriarchae mirabilesque operationes pro Urbis liberatione enarrando singulariter commendavit... (P. A. Petrini (n.5), 175-6,448-52)

Privilegium Ro(manae) Civitatis obtentum per R(everendissimum) card(inalem) Augustanum. Quod Pyrrhus Tharus, Pamphilus Pamphilius, Jo. Bapt. Cicchinus Conservatores de Ill(ustrissi)mo et R(everendissi)mo Cardinali Othone Truchses Civitate donando ad senatum retulerunt, SPQR de ea re ita fieri censuit. Cum veteri more et instituto in Civitate Ro(mana) cupide illi semper studioseque suscepti sint, qui . . . Quam quid(em) S. C. auctoritatem iidem Conservatores per 10

Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Barb.Lat. XXXI, 1 =2481, esp. fols. 121v-127r; Padua, Biblioteca Universitaria, MS 263; Biblioteca Angelica, MS A.7.16 = 77; see Fr. Ehrle, 'Die Frangipani', in Melanges Emile Chatelain (Paris, 1910), 448-85, at 453 n. 1. Panvinio does not mention the office of conservator, concentrating rather on that of cancellarius urbis. 1 ' See C. Cecchelli, I Margani, i Capocci, i Sanguigni, i Mellini (Rome, 1946), 7-20. Cecchelli follows La storia delle famiglie romane di Teodoro Amayden con note ed aggiunte del Comm. Carlo Augusto Bertini, vol. II (Rome, [1910]), 55 n. 1, without source, in claiming that Tiberio Margani was conservator in 1552; I suspect that this is a mistake for 1542. 12 See G. Presutti, 'I Colonna di Riofreddo', Archivio della Societd Romana di Storia Patria 61 (1938), 241-90, at 267 n. 2, for our man; Forcella, vol. I, p. 42, no. 80; vol. II, p. 14, no. 44, for the son. 13 There is nothing in L. Pompilj Olivieri, // senato romano (Rome, 1886), who, however, lists Giovanni Pietro del Drago as conservator in 1583, by mistake for 1584; and there are no further volumes to F. Bartoloni, Codice diplomatico del senato romano dal MCXLIV al

MCCCXL VII (Rome, 1948).

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SPQR scribam perscribendam curarunt. Ann(o) ... Julius Horologius scriba SPQR. (F. Gregorovius (n.4)) Referentibus ad Senatum, Pamphylo Pamphylio, Gabriele Vallato, Octavio Graccho Cons, De donando Civitate Romana Deq(ue) in Senatum legendo Carlo Gualterutio cive Fanensi, Qui per annos quattuor et viginti urbem incoluerit, complures in ea liberos susceperit, bonam existimationem quesierit, rem pararit, Senatui placuit, hominem excellentis in civilib(us) reb(us) industriae, spectatae integritatis atq(ue) virtutis, in ci vita tern atque in hunc ordinem asciscere. Itaq(ue) censuit, uti is eo iure civis Romanus sit, quo qui Optimo sunt, Bona habeat immunia, Magistratus gerat, Omnia alia Civium Romanor(um) commoda ac iura potiatur ipse liberiq(ue) eius ac posteri, Utiq(ue) ei in Senatum veniundi, sententiae dicundae ius sit, Eosq(ue) honores, eaq(ue) emolumenta capiundi, quae caeteri Senatores, Utiq(ue) liberi eius ac posteri, patritii sint, gentemq(ue) habeant. Quae ut nota testataq(ue) in posterum essent, in publicas litteras referri consignariq(ue) iusser(unt). (Archivio Segreto Vaticano, Misc. Arm. XLIV, v. Ill, c. 91r = O.Moroni, Carlo Gualteruzzi (1500-1577) e i correspondenti (Citta del Vaticano, 1984), 129 (inaccurate) = MS Vat.Lat.6038, fol. 113r)

Our decree is peculiar in its systematic use of the formulae of ancient decrees of the senate, uerba fecerunt, de ea re ita censuerunt, senatui placere uti, which do not appear in mediaeval and Renaissance decrees earlier than ours and appear only randomly later; in the use of legal terminology, promulgare, restituere, postliminium, indeed the whole of the end of the decree; in the high style adopted; and in the elaborate nature of the reasons given for the grant and for their historical and literary character, though there are elements of this in the decree of Carlo Gualteruzzi, notably the reference to gentem habere. This reasoning leads on to the observation of another oddity: Roman citizenship was granted in this period to those who had established residence in Rome, witness, the example of Carlo Gualteruzzi; to those who had conferred signal benefits on the city; and, increasingly, on major figures of the world of the arts. But this was an innovation as the sixteenth century advanced, as is shown by the uproar caused by the attempt to grant it to Christopher de Longueilin 1519.14 It is very surprising that citizenship should be granted to two nonentities with a spurious Roman ancestry, even if they could invoke a learned account of that ancestry evidently composed by Pietro Bembo: for the genitive of 'Petri Bembi Cardinalis' presumably indicates authorship rather than ownership, since Matal elsewhere uses 'apud so-and-so' to identify texts which belonged to others and which he copied. The connex14

D. Gnoli, Un giudizio di lesa romanita sotto Leone X (Rome, 1891).

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ion between Pietro Bembo and Donato Rullo, financial adviser to Ascanio and, above all, Vittoria Colonna, is straightforward enough. But who on earth were Quinto Fabio and Teofrasto Rullo, sons of Lupo? The high style is in any case intelligible enough in the greatest Ciceronian of the age. But a different problem lurks beneath the surface. The reasoning in the decree, with its sympathy for the author of the lex agraria of 63 BC which Cicero succeeded in blocking, is actually hostile to Cicero. And what is more, one only has to read the speeches of Cicero after his return from exile to see that his virtuous claim that he had preferred exile to provoking civil strife, is here transferred to P. Servilius Rullus. It is, however, the interest in Roman legal formulae that reveals an unsuspected side to Pietro Bembo, though one may suspect that his sources in general were Frontinus and the famous letter of Caelius to Cicero of 51 BC, rather than any epigraphic or juristic source.15 Bembo was no doubt drawing on his earlier reading, directed at the acquisition of a mastery of Latin style, in the course of which he systematically noted and recorded formulae and turns of phrase suitable for the composition of Latin letters.16 In one case, indeed, both the source of a phrase in our decree and the edition used can be identified: the 1513 edition of Frontinus of Fra Giocondo, which has in ch. 106 the reading D.E.R.V.I.C., unsupported by the manuscript tradition and abandoned in modern editions, but also adopted by Agustin. On the other hand, the phrase 'Hanc autem s(enatus) c(onsulti) auctoritatem iidem consules V Id. Januar, perscribendam curarunt . . . ' is clearly drawn from the letter of Caelius. But such a literary pedigree would not have diminished the interest of the text to Agustin and Matal. They wished to learn about Roman institutions from one of the great figures of the distant days of Leo X, even if these institutions were mediated through a decree of the contemporary senate. For they were lawyers and it was as lawyers that they were in the process of transforming the antiquarian culture of mid-sixteenth-century Rome. And they not only remarked, of course, on the great treasures of Bembo, the manuscripts of Virgil and Terence, when they called on him.17 Agustin and Matal, 'che annotarono ogni minima minutia', together made a copy of the Terence, which was later 15 16

17

Frontinus, De Aquis 100-1, 104, 106, 108, 125, 127; (Cicero), Ad Fam. VIII. 8 = 84 Shackleton Bailey, 5-8. Evidence of this reading survives in Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MSS Chigi L. VHI.304; and Barb. Lat. XXXI, 17; Vat.Gr. 1347 contains a classified list of place names. See V. Cian, 'Contributi alia storia delFenciclopedismo nell' eta della Rinascita. II Methodus Studiorum del Cardinale Pietro Bembo', in Miscellanea Giovanni Sforza (Lucca, 1915), 289-330. C. Flores Selles, Epistolario de Antonio Agustin (Salamanca, 1980), no. 149, pp. 213-15, L. Torelli to Agustin, 20 August 1546; J.-L. Ferrary, Correspondance (n. 1), nos. 52-3, 58-9.

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available to Gabriele Faerno; 18 and on 31 May 1545 Matal wrote to their jurist friend of their Bologna and Florence days, Lelio Torelli, 'ego a paucis diebus utor Terentio et Virgilio Petri Bembi Cardinalis, in quibus expressa uideo non contemnenda uestigia nostrarum Pandectarum\ It would be hard to exemplify better the humanist jurisprudence of the sixteenth century. 18

British Library, Add. MS 10266, fol. 119, G. Faerno to P. Vettori, 29 April 1558.

7

Gentilis and the interpretatio duplex J. L. Barton

One of the reasons for which, in Maitland's opinion, the history of English law was not written was that much mediaeval English legislation remained in force: That process by which old principles and old phrases are charged with a new content, is from the lawyer's point of view an evolution of the true intent and meaning of the old law; from the historian's point of view it is almost of necessity a process of perversion and misunderstanding1 ... I make no doubt that it is easier for a Frenchman or a German to study medieval law than it is for an Englishman; he has not before his mind the fear that he is saying what is not 'practically sound', that he may seem to be unsettling the law or usurping the functions of a judge.2 The sixteenth-century student of Justinian's compilations was in much the same difficulty as the nineteenth-century student of the mediaeval sources of English law. His predecessors had been content to treat the compilations as a code. No doubt the provisions of any code have a history, but what that history may have been is a curious rather than an important question for the expositor who is considering their present application, and the glossators had either ignored historical questions altogether, or treated them very casually. D.29.2.60 is an extract from Javolenus' epitome of Labeo's Posteriora. It concludes with a note of Paul's which, in the Vulgate, had become part of the passage of Javolenus: Paulus et Labeonis sententiam improbant, et in Iavoleni sententia sunt. The gloss suggests that Javolenus is referring to himself in the third person, or that Neratius, from whom L.59 of the same title was taken, is citing Javolenus with approval. This was held a particularly shocking proof of Accursius' barbarous ignorance of antiquity, for not only was this suggestion chronologically impossible; that it was chronologically impossible clearly appeared from Pomponius' account of the succession 1 2

F. W. Maitland, 'Why the History of English Law is not Written', in Collected Papers, vol. I (Cambridge, 1911), 480 at 491. Ibid., at 492-3.

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of the jurists in D.l.2.2.3 For the glossator, the sense of the passage was clear, and the reason for its rather odd form was not of sufficient importance to require him to go to the trouble of checking references. The gloss may note an interpolation upon occasion. According to D.33.5.19, if the legatee of an option dies before he has made his choice, his heir may choose. The gl. 'Placuit' notes that this passage has probably been altered, for in Inst. 2.20.23 Justinian states that it is his constitution which has permitted the legatee's heir to make the choice which his testator failed to make. On the other hand, the gloss may pass over an equally obvious interpolation without comment. According to D.4.4.27.4, 'Adversus eos quoque restitutio praestanda est, quorum de dolo agere non permittitur, nisi si quaedam personae speciali lege exceptae sint.' The gl. 'Lege' refers the reader to Justinian's constitution in C.2.42.2 for the persons who are 'speciali lege exceptae'. If the reference be correct, this latter text is as clearly interpolated as the former, but this the reader may be left to infer for himself. Since an interpolated text is no less authoritative than a text which has not been interpolated, there is no reason to attempt to list interpolations systematically, and it is of no consequence whether an apparent inconsistency should be ascribed to interpolation or to oversight. In D.2.41.5 Justinian provides that prescription shall no longer run against a minor in those cases in which he was formerly granted restitution after time had run. A constitution of Gordian in C.5.72.1 and another of Diocletian and Maximian in C.7.53.3 assume that longi temporis praescriptio does not run against a minor. Placentinus suggested that Justinian had been drinking, and had forgotten these constitutions.4 This was not an attitude which an expositor trained in the new learning could easily maintain consistently, whatever his theoretical opinions. Montaigne's early education was influenced by the suggestion of a friend of his father, that the true reason that we cannot attain the greatness of mind and of knowledge of the Greeks and Romans is that we are obliged to devote many years to mastering the languages which they learned in the cradle. Montaigne was inclined to doubt whether this were the only reason, but though he cannot be accused of an uncritical deference for received opinion, it did not occur to him to question the superiority of the ancients.5 Tribonian, who had been principally responsible for the compilation of the Corpus Iuris, was hardly one of the ancients. In the sixth century, the long decline into barbarism was already well begun. For the honour of his own faculty, Alciatus was willing to defend him against the attacks of others - more particularly of the grammarians, who 3 4

Gribaldus Mopha, De Methodo ac Ratione Studendi (ed. Lugduni, 1564), book I, ch. 15, 131ff. 5 Gl. 'Quaerere', C.2.41.5. Essais, book I, ch. 25.

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were the worst possible judges of the merits of any jurist6 - but he did not always speak very well of him himself. Bartolus deserved the gratitude of posterity for opening eyes which would otherwise have been obscured by the graeculae tenebrae in which Justinian's compilers had involved the Roman texts. Had the works of the ancient jurists still existed, the labours of Accursius and of those who wrote after him would not have been necessary.7 Tribonian was capable of error, and if he could be shown to have erred, it might be questioned whether posterity were obliged to err with him. Balduinus was firmly of opinion that posterity was under no such obligation. His views upon the compilation are expounded in most detail in his Iustinianus, sive de lure Novo.s Tribonian and his colleagues had been guilty of two faults not easily pardoned in the draftsmen of a code: haste and negligence. The passages which they had extracted from the classical jurists had too often been left unrevised, or had been revised insufficiently, and to attempt to make good law of them by construction was to labour in vain. In proof of his thesis, he reviewed Justinian's reforms in chronological order, and showed how imperfectly the new law was reflected in the Digest. Justinian, for example, had provided that all legacies, and indeedfideicommissaalso, should be enforceable in the same manner and by the same remedies. Not only did many texts distinguish still betweenfideicommissaand legacies; the texts on legacies could not be understood without a knowledge of the different legal effects of the different classical forms of legacy, for the compilers had too often struck out the jurist's reference to the form of legacy which he was considering, but left his decision upon its effect unaltered, and the effect varied with the form.9 The Digest must be interpreted historically, not because this method of interpretation was appropriate, but because without a knowledge of legal antiquities the expositor could not disentangle the law in force from that mass of wholly or partially obsolete matter which the compilers, in defiance of their instructions, had incorporated into the Digest. Antony Faber was of opinion that the surest means of detecting the interventions of the compilers was to bear in mind that in their unin6 7 8 9

Dispunctionum, in Opera (ed. Basileae, 1571), book IV, ch. 7. Comment ad Tit. Dig. De Verborum Significatione, at D.50.16.246.1 have used the edition of his works which was published at Basle in 1571. See H. Troje, 'Peccatum Triboniani, zur Dialektik der Interpretatio Duplex bei Francois Baudouin' (1970) 36 S.D.H.I. 341. 'Ac in Pandectis quidem, ubi hac de re quaeritur, vidimus vindicationis et damnationis mentionem expunctam saepius, deletamque esse. Sed tanto magis interea queror, non solum lituram esse relictam, sed et rem ipsam tarn varie, adeoque contrarie nihilominus proponi, ut necesse videatur ad conciliationem, repetere vetus illud discrimen, et nos ad illud iterum confugere.' Justinianus, sive de lure Novo (ed. Basileae, 1560), book II, at 110.

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telligent haste they commonly mistook the true reason of the law. 10 In the rei vindicatio, restitution manu militari had replaced the iusiurandum in litem. The iusiurandum in litem appeared in the Digest only because Tribonian did not understand the mechanism of the actio arbitraria. It served no purpose, if the thing itself might be restored in specie.1! This is reasoning of which Balduinus might not have disapproved, but if Tribonian did not understand the law which he had undertaken to digest, it might be questioned whether it were invariably necessary to attribute legislative force to his blunders. In his De Erroribus Pragmaticorum et Interpretum, which he wrote for the instruction of practitioners, Faber observes at one point that the reader may object that he is discussing the errors not of the interpreters, but of Tribonian. He, however, holds Tribonian to be an interpreter, and an unskilful one, not a iuris auctor,12 and he seems willing upon occasion to act upon his opinion. It is Tribonian and not Paul who holds in D.26.7.43.1 that a curator who has promised a dowry which exceeds his ward's fortune is not answerable to her husband for the overplus, save in so far as she is able to indemnify him, though she must give her husband security to pay the balance, which he cannot claim from her curator should she come to better fortune. Faber makes no apology for treating this passage at length, for it is of great importance, and proper to be explained according to Paul's opinion and the right reason of the law, rejecting the notes of Tribonian and the errors of the interpreters. 13 It is not obvious why it should be of great importance, or indeed of any importance at all, unless we are to hold that a judge as well as an expositor is at liberty to follow the right reason of the law, rejecting the notes of Tribonian and the errors of the interpreters. For Heineccius, Balduinus and Faber were two of the three principal members (Hotman was the third) of the 'secta Tribonianomastigum'. 14 He found their opinions so unreasonable that he was driven to conclude that they had been inspired by academic jealousy. They were led to attack Justinian's compilations because they had very justifiably despaired of ever rivalling the great Cujas as interpreters of them. 10 11

12 13 14

Coniecturae Iuris Civilis (ed. Aureliae Allobrogum, 1609), book XII, ch. 1. Coniecturae Iuris Civilis, book XVI, ch. 17: 'An ergo, inquies, legem hanc e libris nostris delebimus, cum non sit Ulpiani? Immo vero pro imperatoria constitutione habebimus, sed ad earn interpretandam in perquirenda iuris ratione quam aperte labefactat operam, si mihi credis, non impendemus, potiusque fatebimur arbitrarias actiones hodie nullas esse, posteaquam placuit Triboniano, manu militari faciendum esse ut omnimodo arbitrio pareatur.' See also De Erroribus Pragmaticorum (ed. Lugduni, 1598), Decas XVIII, Error 5. De Erroribus Pragmaticorum, Decas XVIII, Error 6. Coniecturae Iuris Civilis, book VI, ch. 18. Heineccius, 'De Secta Tribonianomastigum', in Opera (Genevae, 1767), vol. Ill, 171 at 174ff.

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Cujas was certainly no Tribonianomastix. Tribonian, he held, was another Papinian. 15 Those who criticised the arrangement of the Digest, or who wished to change it, were ineptissimi and imperitissimi, who knew neither what was an art, nor the art of the Digest, and could never have understood the clear principles of the civil law, though this arrangement was not Tribonian's own, but that of the earlier jurists whom he had followed.16 He was prepared none the less to hold Tribonian capable of error, and indeed of negligence - in some instances, of rather grave negligence. In D. 50.4.7 Marcian states that imperial constitutions have provided that one accused of crime may not stand for public office though sentence be not yet given, but if a year have elapsed since proceedings were commenced he is not prohibited, 'nisi per ipsum steterit, quominus causa intra annum expediretur'. Criminal proceedings, as we may see from the Theodosian Code, formerly lapsed if judgment were not given within a year. Justinian extended the term to two years, but the compilers have failed to correct this passage, quod a me adnotatum est, non tarn ut ille locus explicaretur, quam etiam ut Triboniani non curantia proderetur.17 The compilers, in his opinion, did not always understand the texts which they excerpted. According to D.2.15.6 (Gaius, 17 ad edictum provinciale): De his controversiis, quae ex testamento proficiscuntur, neque transigi neque exquiri veritas aliter potest, quam inspectis cognitisque verbis testamenti. This is taken from the same passage of Gaius as D.29.3.1, where the verb transigere is applied 'per translationem . . . ad iudicata, non ad conventa sive composita'. It therefore does not properly belong in the title De Transactionibus, for the jurist was speaking of a settlement by judicial decision, not by the agreement of the parties. 18 Elsewhere, Cujas takes occasion to explain that he did not say, as he is alleged to have said, that in C.4.23.4, 'Praetextu debiti restitutio commodati non probabiliter recusatur', we should read commendati for commodati. This could be an impossible emendation, for the constitution is in the title De Commodato. What he did say, and he is of this opinion still, was that commendati was the original reading of the constitution. The emperors were speaking not of commodatum but of deposit, in which there was no set-off. In the copy which the compilers used, commodati had been substituted for the rarer 15 16 17 18

Comment, ad Lib. VI Cod. tit. 43, upon the rubric. I have used the edition of the works of Cujas (omitting the posthumous works) which was published at Frankfurt in 1623. Paratitla ad L Libros Digestorum, at D.I7.1. Observationes et Emendationes, book I, ch. 8. Comment, ad tit. D. De Transactionibus, at 1.1, in fine.

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commendati by the error of a scribe, and the compilers therefore assumed that the constitution was intended to apply to commodatum.19 Cujas had the good fortune to be writing in a country in which the compilations of Justinian did not have the force of imperial legislation. He was not, therefore, obliged to consider whether, if Gaius were not speaking in D.2.15.6 of a settlement of a disputed claim by agreement between the parties, a judge might hold that there was no difference in law between a settlement of a claim under a testament and a settlement of any other claim, or whether, if C.4.23.4 were written of deposit, a judge before whom a defendant who was sued for the return of a thing which had been lent to him for his use attempted to rely upon a set-off might ignore it. Gribaldus Mopha was less discreet. One of his illustrations of the importance for the student of a knowledge of the methods of the compilers and of the principles of textual criticism is D.41.2.8 (Paul, 54 ad edictum): Quemadmodum nulla possessio adquiri nisi animo et corpore potest, ita nulla amittitur, nisi in qua utrumque in contrarium actum est. Paul says precisely the opposite elsewhere. 20 The contradiction is easily resolved if for Quemadmodum we read Non quemadmodum - a locution which is frequent in the jurists - but the lex geminata (D.50.17.153 (Paul, 65 ad edictum)) is not so easily amended: Fere quibuscumque modis obligamur, iisdem in contrarium actis liberamur, cum quibus modis adquirimus, isdem in contrarium actis amittimus. Ut igitur nulla possessio adquiri nisi animo et corpore potest, ita nulla amittitur, nisi in qua utrumque in contrarium actum est. If it be an illustration of the principle of contrarius actus that possession is lost, as it is acquired, animo et corpore, and neither animo solo nor corpore solo, it is hardly possible to argue that a negligent scribe has omitted a negative which would have made the doctrine of contrarius actus inapplicable to the loss of possession. Gribaldus was equal to the challenge. The extracts which compose the title De Regulis Iuris have been put together from fragments of different jurists by the compilers or by others unde quidquid ibi primo versiculo (qui ex Pomponio desumptus est) adiectum reperitur, ex nullius iurisconsulti auctoritate, vel sententia prolatum est. Quare expungendum omnino putarem.21 19 20 21

Observationes et Emendationes, b o o k IX, ch. 27. D.41.2.3.6 (Paul, 54 ad edictum). De Methodo ac Ratione Studendi, b o o k I, ch. 16 (ed. Lugduni, 1564), 145-6.

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If we may take it that Tribonian, or another, has borrowed Pomponius' observation upon contrarius actus from D.46.3.80 (Pomponius, 4 ad Q. Mucinum), and added it to an extract from Paul which did not mention the point, and that this passage of Paul originally (whether or not when it came into the hands of the compilers) contained a negative which has dropped out, or been struck out, of the text which we now have, we may quite properly strike out the reference to contrarius actus and restore the negative. That the compilers clearly thought that the negative had been properly omitted is neither here nor there, for an opinion supported only by the authority of Tribonian is 'ex nullius iurisconsulti auctoritate vel sententia prolatum'. From Faber or from Hotman, this would not have been a very remarkable observation. Gribaldus, however, was an Italian, and like most of his compatriots at this period, more conservatively than radically inclined. The authors whom he particularly recommended to the student (who would, he held, profit more from the diligent study of a few good writers than from indiscriminate reading) were Bartolus, Baldus, Paulus Castrensis, Alexander Tartagnus, Jason Maynus and Imola.22 That a writer who was certainly no opponent of the mos italicus should still be capable of holding it self-evident that the authority of the compilers was of no weight if they could be shown to have differed from the jurists of the classical age is a very striking testimony to the prestige of antiquity. It was not an opinion universally professed by the exponents of the mos italicus. Pacius, who thought the method of the French school of his own day more proper for grammarians than for legists,23 held it unnecessary to labour to detect interpolations in Digest and Code, for it was no longer of any consequence how the law stood before Justinian.24 However, he was not perfectly consistent: post editas ex Pandectis Florentinis inscriptiones legum Pandectarum per quas inscriptiones licet capita coniungere a Triboniano seiuncta, iam multa facile et feliciter enarrantur, quorum veram sententiam veteres interpretes ea conferendi leges commoditate destituti assequi non potuerunt.25 To put together the fragments which Tribonian has separated is no doubt a help to discovering the meaning of the jurist from whom the extracts were taken, but if this be the only way in which it may be discovered, it might seem fairly arguable that we should infer that the meaning of the jurist was not the meaning of the compilers. This was the opinion of Albericus Gentilis, who, almost alone among his contemporaries, distinguished clearly and consistently between historical and dog22 23 24

De Methodo ac Ratione Studendi, b o o k I, ch. 12 (ed. Lugduni, 1564), 123-4. De Iuris Methodo Libri II (Spirae, 1597), b o o k II, at 72. Ibid., at 66.

25

/6K/., at 51.

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matic interpretation. The latter, in his view, was the province of the legist, who was not concerned to discover what law the Romans had followed, whether at Rome or at Constantinople, but to determine how the law now stood.26 It was absurd to criticise Accursius for inferring that if, as Modestinus states in D.23.2.1, marriage involves divini et humani iuris communication spouses must be of the same religion.27 Modestinus was indeed a pagan, and it might be that when he spoke of divini iuris communicatio he was referring to the family worship of pagan Rome,28 but whether this were in fact the case was of no more importance than whether by the phrase damnati adferrum in D.28.1.8.4 Gaius meant those condemned to the arena,29 or by the Judaica superstitio which, Ulpian tells us in D.50.2.3.3, Severus and Antoninus had declared not to be a disqualification for municipal office, Ulpian meant the Christian religion, or whether the ignaviae sectatores whom Valentinianus and Valens mention in C. 10.32.26 were monks. The names of the jurists from whom the passages which are excerpted in the Digest were taken are preserved only for the honour of antiquity. Since all the texts of the compilation, from whatever source they have been taken, are to be taken as legislation of Justinian, it is no concern of the legist in what sense a pagan jurist, or one or other of Justinian's predecessors, may be more or less probably held to have used this or that expression. He is to consider what sense these expressions should be held to bear in the legislation of a Christian emperor, under whom gladiatorian contests were prohibited. What was the original meaning of a text is in any case a speculative question, for the compilers have altered many passages, so that we cannot be certain whether any particular expression should be attributed to the jurist whose name appears at the head of the extract or to the compilers.30 26 27 28 29

30

De Iuris Interpretibus Dialogi Sex, ed. G . A s t u t i ( T o r i n o , 1937), 86. C o n n a n u s , Commentariorum Iuris Civilis, b o o k V I I I , ch. 4 (ed. Lutetiae, 1553). Alciatus, Parergon, b o o k V, ch. 25. Alciatus, Parergon, b o o k I, ch. 2 3 . See also Gentilis, Lectiones et Epistulae quae ad Ius Civile Pertinent ( L o n d i n i a p u d Wolfium, 1583), b o o k I, ch. 7. Cujas (Observationes et Emendationes, b o o k X I I I , ch. 10) h o l d s t h a t in the original of the rescript cited in D.47.14.1 pr. H a d r i a n , after o b s e r v i n g t h a t dbigei w h o a r e t o be severely p u n i s h e d are ordinarily damnati adgladium, went o n to a d d that in case of a very grave or of a second offence damnatio ad metallum might be a p p r o p r i a t e . We must therefore take damnatio ad gladium to be c o n d e m n a t i o n to the arena, a n d T r i b o n i a n should not have omitted these w o r d s , since damnatio ad metallum is mentioned subsequently in the same passage. Gentilis' c o m m e n t is, ' A t is n o n debuit eo m o d o tractare H a d r i a n i rescriptum. Itane loqui possunt? E t n o s m a n u s d a m u s . ' Cujas, however, was of opinion t h a t the abolition of gladiatorum spectacula h a d not entailed the abolition of the ludus gladiatorius, a n d that damnatio adferrum was therefore to be taken to bear its classical meaning in the law of Justinian. De Iuris Interpretibus Dialogi Sex, 167fT. See also at 208, ' C r e d o potius controversias, labyrinthos inexplicabiles ex illis m o n u m e n t i s [antiquitatis]; q u o n i a m i n n u m e r a aliter relata sunt a compilatoribus, i n n u m e r a translata in alium sensum.'

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Since it is not the meaning of the jurist which is in question, it naturally follows that the inscription of the passage is useless as an aid to its interpretation, and indeed that it is improper to make use of it. Justinian has not only stated that the inscriptions are preserved merely for the honour of antiquity; he has expressly forbidden resort to the original text. If the original text would be of no authority had it survived, a conjectural reconstruction of the original text is of even less authority. Whether or not Ulpian was speaking of the lex Falcidia, or of the interdict Quod legatorum, when he said that 'Per omnia exaequata sunt legata fideicommissis',31 the compilers were not. That a fideicommissary manumission differs in effect from a direct testamentary manumission is no objection to this generalisation, for since libertates are to be deemed repeated if legacies be repeated,32 a gift of liberty is not a legacy.33 Whether it were of the Edict Quod quisque iuris that Ulpian said 'Cogitationis poenam nemo patitur'34 is of no consequence whatever. To object that this is hardly correct if we take it as a general proposition, since 'in aliis plerisque causis non tantum effectus punitur, sed etiam voluntas',35 is to ignore the elementary distinction between simple cogitation and the purpose with which an act is done.36 It is an even graver error to argue that a jurist is not necessarily to be held to have adopted an opinion which he cites. For Cujas, the opinion of Callistratus in D.5.1.37 and of Marcian in D.48.6.5.1 that if violence and possession come in question together the question of violence should be determined before the question of property was no authority that the judge should decide the question of possession before the question of property if possessorium and petitorium be brought together. Had the jurists been speaking of the interdict Unde vi, they could hardly have treated violence and possession as two distinct questions, for a plaintiff who had not been in possession could not be violently ejected. We must take them to have meant that if the party injured chose to proceed criminally for the violence, and civilly for the possession or for the property, the criminal proceedings were to be first determined. Since, however, C.4.62.1 and C.9.12.7 can hardly be explained in this manner, it would seem that the imperial constitution which both jurists cite did refer to proceedings to recover possession rather than to punish the intruder. 31

32 33 34 35 36

D.30.1 (Ulpian, 67 adedictum). Cujas, Paratitla adLLibros Digestorum, book 30. The gl. 'per omnia' makes a rather similar suggestion: 'Vel die quod aliquid est hie detractum ex verbis Ulpiani a compilatoribus novi iuris, et illud detractum inducit novitatem.' D.50.16.80. Gentilis, Lectiones et Epistulae quae ad Ius Civile Pertinent, b o o k I, ch. 17. D.48.19.18 (Ulpian 3 adedictum). Cujas, Observations et Emendationes, b o o k VIII, ch. 22. Gentilis, Lectiones et Epistulae quae ad Ius Civile Pertinent, b o o k I, ch. 13, b o o k I I , ch. 12. See also b o o k I, ch. 17, where he observes that in D.30.1 the draftsman 'in alium sensum o m n i n o deduxerit Ulpiani verba, q u a m fuerunt a b ipso prolata'.

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That they cited it, however, is not proof that they accepted it as sound.37 For Gentilis, the question of possession and the question of violence were no more distinct in criminal than in civil proceedings, for violence might be committed only against a possessor. There was therefore no inconsistency between C.9.12.7 and C.4.62.1: Trius de possessione pronuntiare, et ita crimen violentiae excutere praeses provinciae debuit', for to say that the judge must first determine the question of violence and to say that he should have first determined the question of possession and thus determined the offence of violence is to state the same proposition in different words. Both these texts are perfectly consistent with the constitution cited in the two Digest passages, for Marcian states in D.48.6.5.1 that Antoninus Pius decided 4ut prius de vi quaeratur, quam de iure dominii sive possessionis'. He was speaking not of actual possession, but of the right of possession, and though it cannot be known whether I have suffered violence until it appear whether I were in possession, whether I have suffered violence and whether I have a right to possess are undoubtedly two distinct questions.38 If the texts of the compilation are to be taken as different parts of a single law, it is no less improper to argue that one passage states the old law, and another the new. In D.50.16.88 Celsus says that a man is commonly said to leave as much money as his goods are worth, but the case is different if he leave a legacy of another's land, though he leave money enough to buy it, for one who has money is not said to have what he may buy with it. In D.35.2.61 Javolenus assumes that a legacy of an estate which is not the property of the testator is valid. If these two passages require to be reconciled, to hold that Celsus was speaking of a legatum per vindicationem and Javolenus of a legatum per damnationem is no way to reconcile them.39 Similarly whether the jurists differed in opinion, or a particular jurist hesitated, is not a question for the legist, who is concerned to discover the intention of Justinian, not the opinions of the jurists upon whom his compilers drew.40 In D. 18.7.6.1 (Papinian, 27 Quaestionum) Papinian confesses that he formerly held that if a term which had been inserted into a contract for the sale of a slave at the seller's instance were intended as a penalty upon the slave, no action would lie against a buyer who ignored it unless the seller had a pecuniary interest in its performance, as if the breach would render him liable to a penalty which he had promised to another. However, the argument of Sabinus, 37 38 39 40

Observationes et Emendationes, b o o k V, ch. 15. Lectiones et Epistulae quae adIus Civile Pertinent, b o o k II, ch. 12. See also b o o k I, ch. 13. Lectiones et Epistulae quae ad Ius Civile Pertinent, b o o k I, ch. 13; Cujas, Observationes et Emendationes, b o o k X I V , ch. 36. Lectiones et Epistulae quae ad Ius Civile Pertinent, b o o k I, ch. 13.

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that the action should lie because a slave sold subject to a restriction of this kind may be assumed to have been sold at a lower price for that reason, now inclines him to hold the contrary. In D.I8.7.7 (Papinian, 10 Quaestionum) Papinian states that if a slave be sold 'ne in Italia esset', and the buyer agree, but do not promise by stipulation, that he will pay a penal sum if the slave be brought to Italy, an action will hardly lie for the penalty unless the buyer's breach make the seller liable to pay a penalty which he has promised to another. For Cujas, Papinian evidently changed his opinion after he had composed the tenth, and before he had composed the twenty-seventh, book of his Quaestiones.41 For Gentilis: 'Variaverit igitur auctor eorum Papinianus: an ideo dicendum est, compilatores etiamnum pugnantia loqui?' We are to take D.I8.7.6.1 with its reason. A term of this kind will be enforceable if it appear that because of this restriction the slave was in fact sold at a lower price.42 It is an even more fundamental error to suggest that one provision of the compilation has abrogated another.43 According to a passage from the Sententiae in D.23.2.38, a provincial governor may be betrothed to a woman of his province, though he may not marry her until he has laid down his office, and she may then refuse to marry him, upon returning the arra sponsalicia. C.5.2.1 provides that if the governor's betrothed, or her relatives, change their minds the arra sponsalicia need not be returned. Cujas held that this constitution abrogated D.23.2.38.44 Gentilis adopted the first solution of Accursius. The arra sponsalicia need not be returned if the betrothal were repudiated while the sponsus was still governor of the province, but must be repaid if he had already laid down his office.45 Gentilis does not altogether neglect the 'secta Tribonianomastigum'. In his final dialogue he has something to say of Hotman, who was the most violent of the three, though the dreadful truth that he thought very little better of the classical jurists than of Tribonian did not become publicly known until his Anti-Tribonianus was published, after his death. Gentilis concentrated his attack, however, principally upon Cujas. This was a judicious choice, for the vices of the historical method might be better illustrated from the work of a writer who applied it to the interpretation of Justinian's compilations than from the writings of a Tribonianomastix who was more concerned to determine how much of the compilations 41 42 43 44 45

Observationes et Emendationes, b o o k II, ch. 36. Lectiones et Epistulae quae adlus Civile Pertinent, b o o k II, ch. 12. Lectiones et Epistulae quae ad Ius Civile Pertinent, b o o k I, ch. 13. Observationes et Emendationes, b o o k IV, ch. 2 1 . Lectiones et Epistulae quae ad Ius Civile Pertinent, b o o k II, ch. 12. This was a point u p o n which Gentilis grew somewhat less rigid in his later years. In his De Libris Iuris Civilis he is prepared to admit that o n e part of the compilation m a y correct another. See, for example, ed. Hanoviae 1605, at 10-11.

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must be given up as unsavable. For an author barely thirty years of age to attack the modern school with this vigour was perhaps bold, but is hardly sufficient in itself to explain Gentilis' bad reputation with posterity. In a remarkable passage of his Respublica Iurisconsultorum De Januario observes: illud tamen miror quamquimaxime, eo furoris devenisse Albericum Gentilem, ut pro hisce ineptiis arma viriliter sumat, putetqe arroganter nimis, Accursium recte coniectare, sacra, quae in Pandectis memorantur, ab religione nostra nequaquam abhorrere, cum opus illud ad Iustiniani mentem, Christianique cultus formam sit concinnatum, utut, in veterum iurisconsultorum obsequium, horum nomina in fronte legum prae se ferat.46 The charge of arrogance is hardly very well supported by the particulars. Gentilis' offence is merely to take Justinian's intimation that constitutionum vicem et has leges optinere censuimus quasi ex nobis promulgatas47 at face value. The charge of insanity is a little extreme, coming from anyone but a convinced Tribonianomastix, who would no doubt have argued that in what sense the references to sacra in the juristic texts were intended to be taken in the legislation of a Christian emperor was an idiotic question, since only an idiot would imagine that the compilers had considered the point at all. Gentilis, however, had been guilty of a worse offence than supporting Accursius against the moderns. He had spoken of the new learning in a manner which could hardly fail to shock contemporaries, though not altogether without provocation from those ambitious souls who recommended the legist to make himself master of the whole circle of the sciences. The task of mastering the law was occupation enough. Since the province of the legist was dogmatic, not historical interpretation, he need not acquire that knowledge of antiquity which would have been necessary to qualify him to interpret the texts historically. It was not merely a knowledge of ancient history that might be dispensed with. He need not aspire to write a Latin of classical purity, and would do better not to attempt it, for the time which he would be obliged to spend polishing his language might be more profitably devoted to the study of the texts.48 Greek might be neglected altogether. The old translation was admirably literal, and a perfectly satisfactory substitute for the original, save where the meaning of the original was disputable, and in that case the legist would be obliged to rely on the opinions of others unless he were a profound Grecian. If he aspired to become a profound legist he could 46 48

47 Ed. Neapoli 1731, at 24^5. Const. Tanta, 20a. De Iuris Interpretibus Dialogi Sex, II (Paulus), at 45-83.

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hardly spare the time to become a profound Grecian. If he possessed an elementary knowledge of Greek, he would be no better for it than if he had known no Greek at all. To be able to read the Greek commentators was not an advantage of much value.49 Gentilis did not stop there. Since the study of languages exercised the memory rather than the reason, it had ordinarily no very good effect upon the higher intellectual faculties of those who spent much time upon it. Few scholars profoundly skilled in languages attained much distinction in any other branch of learning, and it might be doubted whether the modern practice of requiring schoolboys to learn Greek as well as Latin were good for their future development.50 The older commentators were the superiors of the moderns certainly in method, and, Gentilis was prepared to argue, even in style. That they encumbered their commentaries with superfluous references was a criticism which came singularly ill from those who were given to appropriating the solutions of their predecessors and superiors without acknowledgment.51 The superfluous and sophistical questions with which they were alleged to complicate the exposition of the texts were not superfluous, and not necessarily the worse for being sophistical. The study of the laws was not a preparation for practice in Plato's republic, or in Utopia, and the legist must come to court prepared to meet the specious as well as the substantial arguments which might be relied upon against his client. This, Gentilis asserted, had been the practice of the ancients, and in their manner of argument, and in the form of their exposition, the jurists of the mos italicus resembled the jurists of classical Rome very much more closely than did their detractors.52 When Pantagruel studied the law at Bourges, he was accustomed to say that the books of the law seemed to him a beautiful robe of gold, marvellously triumphant and precious, bordered with filth - for, said he, there are not in the world books sofine,so well adorned, so elegant, as are the texts of the Pandects, but their border, that is to say the gloss of Accurius, is so dirty, so infamous and stinking, that it is merely ordure and villainy.53 This is not an opinion which he would have imbibed from Cujas, who held Accursius the superior of any other interpreter of the law, whether Latin or Greek.54 Pantagruel's creator was a physician, not a 49 51

52 53 54

50 De Iuris Interpretibus Dialogi Sex, III (Cato), at 86ff. Ibid., at 104. See, for example, De Iuris Interpretibus Dialogi Sex, VI (Antipater) at 225: 'An legatum in extranei voluntatem transferri possit; magna est quaestio. Tu vide meos interpretes ad 1. capitatorias, de her. inst. et ad 1. captatoriae, de leg. 1, et si Cuiacius quidquam ex se dicit, mentiar ego in aeternum.' Cujas considers this question in Observationes et Emendationes, book II, ch. 2. De Iuris Interpretibus Dialogi Sex, I V (Trebatius) at 115. Rabelais, Pantagruel, ch. 5. Observationes et Emendationes, b o o k I I I , ch. 11. H e w a s even prepared t o defend the style, if n o t of Accursius, at least of Bulgarus a n d J o h a n n e s : Observationes et Emendationes, b o o k VII, ch. 36.

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legist. It was one thing, however, to argue that the faults of the older commentators were those of the less happy times in which it had been their misfortune to live, and that they might be pardoned the barbarity of their style and their ignorance of good letters in consideration of their other merits. It was a very different matter to suggest that elegance of style and a knowledge of good letters were not accomplishments which any legist need trouble to cultivate, and that the commentaries upon the texts of Justinian which had been written in an age of Gothic barbarism were more truly classical than the works of contemporaries. This was to argue that ignorance was to be preferred to enlightenment, and it was perhaps inevitable that this apparent perversity should distract attention from the substantial point that Gentilis was making; a point upon which he was exceptionally clear-sighted. Nearly two centuries after his time Bynkershoek, who was both a historian of Roman law (and a very learned one) and a judge, found it impossible to hold that whether a text were interpolated was a merely historical, not a legal question: Quemadmodum vero ... ipsius iurisprudentiae interresset, nullum omnino dari emblema, ita et interest, dari quam paucissima. Quapropter non oportet nos esse liberates in his vel temere iactandis, vel anxie investigandis; quin nee ullum largiendum, si res aliter salva esse possit, et an possit, tentanda prius omnia, omnis movendus lapis.55

The legist should approach the question whether a passage of the Digest be interpolated in the same manner as he should approach the question whether it be impossible to reconcile it with another passage in the same compilation. If two provisions in the same legislative code might appear to the superficial eye to be inconsistent, the office of the expositor is to reconcile them, and if they may be so construed that they can stand together, this is to be deemed their true construction. Whether, as a matter of historical fact the difficulty may not be due to the oversight of the draftsman is a question upon which it is not necessary, or indeed proper, to speculate. Since both provisions are equally authoritative, effect must be given to both. Interpolation, we are to take it, is as much a defect as bad draftsmanship. It would be better for the science of jurisprudence if Justinian's compilations contained no interpolations. Since it cannot be denied that some passages are interpolated, it is better to hold that the compilations contain as few interpolations as may be, and the office of the expositor of a text is to discover reasons to hold it genuine. The English reader may be reminded of the controversy between 55

Observationum Iuris Romani libri Quattuor, Quattuor prioribus additi (ed. Lugdini Bata-

vorum, 1732), Praefatio ad Lectorem.

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Challis and Maitland upon the question whether a remainder might be limited after a conditional fee in the reign of Henry III. Maitland had been at pains to stress that he was not suggesting for a moment that a remainder limited after a conditional fee might be good in the reign of Victoria. Challis, while admitting that such remainders appeared in thirteenth-century settlements, was reluctant to hold this evidence of anything save the ignorance of the draftsmen, or, to put it at its highest, of the uncertainty of the law, which encouraged conveyancers to experiment with speculative limitations.56 We should not admit that a limitation which would be clearly invalid at this day would have been supported six centuries ago if the evidence can be made to bear any other interpretation, for to do so would be to throw doubt upon the claim of the modern rule to be deemed a rule of the common law. Similarly for Bynkershoek, to admit that a doctrine to be found in the Digest was not classical would be to give more countenance than was desirable to conclusions which were not 'practically sound'. That the law is one study and the history of the law another is not a position which it is easy to maintain consistently, if the law is founded upon ancient texts. That Gentilis was capable of doing so might be held a singular merit, though it was one which gained him little esteem in his own day. 56

Challis's Law of Real Property (3rd edn by Charles Sweet, London, 1911), appendix II.

8

Ius gentium in the practice of the Court of Admiralty around 1600 Alain Wijffels

Traditionally, the reputation of the early modern English Civil lawyers has to a large extent been based on their supposed expertise in international law. At an academic level, writings by Gentili, Zouch and others are presented as pre- and post-Grotian 'classics'. Much in the same way as on the European continent, jurists trained in ius civile at law faculties were usually called upon for diplomatic missions. Their role, however, was mostly a subordinate one. In the new literary genre on ambassadors and embassies which flourished from the last two decades of the sixteenth century onwards, the 'perfect ambassador' was deemed to be well-versed in history, but much less in law. Apart from diplomatic service, the practice of the High Court of Admiralty, a preserve for members of Doctors' Commons, provided the Civil lawyers with the aura of a specialism in international law. Litigation at the Court of Admiralty, fostered by privateering or more peaceful foreign trade, reflected the world-wide commercial interests of late Elizabethan England and, consequently, the need to settle international disputes according to universally accepted legal standards among European nations. This need was acknowledged at the paramount level of government, as evidenced in a notorious (and often-quoted) speech by James I in 1610: It is true, that I doe greatly esteeme the Civill Law, the profession thereof serving more for generall learning, and being most necessary for matters of Treatie with all forreine Nations. And I thinke that if it should be taken away, it would make an entrie to Barbarisme in this Kingdome, and would blemish the honour of England: For it is in a manner Lex Gentium, and maintaineth Intercourse with all forreine Nations: but I only allow it to have course here according to those limits of Jurisdiction, which the Common law it selfe doth allow it.1 1

Quoted after The Kings Maiesties Speach To the Lords and Commons of this present Parliament at Whitehall, on Wednesday the xxj. of March. Anno Dom. 1609. Imprinted at London by Robert Barker, Printer to the Kings most Excellent Maiestie (copy: Cambridge UL Syn. 7.60.63); also in: The Workes of the Most High and Mightie prince, lames By the Grace of God, King of Great Britaine, France and Ireland, Defender of the Faith, &c. Published by IAMES, Bishop of Winton, and Deane of his Maiesties Chappel Royall. London, Printed by Robert Barker and Iohn Bill, 1616, 532.

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The assimilation of Civil law and ius gentium is of course not unequivocal. It raises the question of the foundation of the Civil law's authority in England, and hereby the controversial problem whether the Civil law was to be considered as part of the lex terrae or not. The King's speech also illustrates another ambiguity regarding the concept of ius gentium. The reference to the law of treaties suggests something similar to the modern notion of the law of nations as inter-state law, whereas the latter part of the quotation is characteristic of a far less positivistic era, when the national municipal laws of the sovereign states had not yet acquired a monopoly of the authoritative legal sources regulating the relations between private persons. The theoretical and political aspects of these controversies have often been discussed.2 In what follows, which implicitly relies much on Peter Stein's fundamental publications on the 'character and influence of the Civil law' both in England and in the rest of the world, I shall try to express the English Civil lawyers' concept of ius gentium from a more pedestrian, and at the same time very different, perspective. Drawing on Julius Caesar's notes as Admiralty judge (c. 1582-1606),3 the following paragraphs will show how the Civil law practitioners at the High Court of Admiralty referred to ius gentium in their pleadings and memoranda.4 In general, technical references to the learned law (allegationes) reflect the method followed by civilian practitioners throughout European courts at the time. Both Roman Civil law and Roman Canon law are extensively quoted.5 Besides the fundamental texts (the corpora iuris), a wide range of doctrinal authorities are constantly being referred to. The 2

3 4

5

On various uses of the terms ius gentium and ius naturale in the English context, see D. R. Coquillette, The Civilian Writers of Doctors' Commons, London. Three Centuries of Juristic Innovation in Comparative, Commercial and International Law, Comparative Studies in Continental and Anglo-American Legal History 3 (Berlin, 1988), 32-7. On Julius Caesar as Admiralty judge: L. M. Hill, Bench and Bureaucracy. The Public Career of Sir Julius Caesar, 1580-1636 (Cambridge, 1988), chapter 2. The notes are mainly concentrated in BL MSS Lansdowne 129, 130, 131 and 135. In many cases, the notes are not very elaborate, and sometimes they simply consist of a few references to authorities. In 1992-7, a research project sponsored by the Netherlands Scientific Organisation (NWO) will try to establish a data-base combining the Caesar Papers at the British Library (both the notes which are referred to in the present contribution and various other documents collected or transcribed by Caesar) and the records of the court (PRO, HCA). Throughout the sixteenth century, and well after the Counter-Reformation, English Civil lawyers kept abreast of current developments in the Roman Canon law. This attitude was not inspired by religious motives, but by the need to keep pace with changes in legal methods affecting the whole of the ius commune tradition. For the English ecclesiastical courts a convincing reassessment of the Civil lawyers' approach is offered by R. H. Helmholz, Roman Canon Law in Reformation England (Cambridge, 1990). Since Canon law also influenced to a considerable degree the general principles and the law of procedure, it is not surprising that a similar observation can be made in the practice of the Admiralty Court, even for the early Stuart period.

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bulk of the latter belong to the mos italicus tradition and some monographical works (in particular, treatises) heralded the early usus modernus, while legal humanistic scholarship is virtually ignored. On the whole, these tendencies confirm the findings of recent research into the academic legal library holdings in England during the last quarter of the sixteenth century. The predominance of mos italicus authorities is also a clear indication that the characteristic method of that school still governed the forensic argumentations of the late Elizabethan and early Stuart Civil lawyers. Their arguments, therefore, very much resemble those of their contemporary continental counterparts. Predictably, a large proportion of the references are concerned with procedural questions, and more in particular with the law of evidence. General principles, or specific rules drawn from any area of the law, on which a general applicability is then conferred, play a greater role than any form of strict systematisation of the law in which only the rules belonging specifically to a particular field are applicable. In the same vein, references to rules by analogy are common practice. On the other hand, there are also clear signs that the more systematic approach of the (early) usus modernus was under way. A major impediment, however, was the absence of a specialised legal literature on international maritime law. Privateering and prize-law, probably the most important issues the Admiralty Court had to deal with, were a subject which no legal work treated systematically. Nevertheless, the pleadings show that the English practitioners endeavoured to incorporate in their arguments the more specialised legal publications offered on the bookmarket. These included works in the ius commune tradition, for example the popular collection on maritime law edited by B. Straccha, but also foreign municipal law, for instance, de La Popeliniere's compilation L'Admiral de France. In a more traditional way, yet expressing the tendency to restrict the authorities ratione materiae, many arguments concentrate their quotations around specific titles of the Corpus Iuris Civilis, notably (for example on questions of liability of factors or their principals) C.4.25, D.14.1 and D.14.3, and the corresponding commentaries. For (mostly, incidental) questions on the law of war, Civil lawyers were keen to quote the late sixteenth-century treatises by Ayala, Bellus and a few others.6 In short, the authorities referred to in the pleadings reflect the transition from mos italicus literature and method to usus modernus. This transitory character implies that, although many arguments ignore 6

See, for example, BL MS Lansdowne 135, fol. 98r (Dr Hammond): 'and other that have written particuler treatises de bello, or de re militari, as Martinus Laudensis, Joan, de Lignano, Claudius Cotereus, Petrinus Bellus, Balthasar ab Ayala, Ferdinandus Vasquius lib. quest, illustrium, the places whereof wanting my bookes I can not more particularly recite'.

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any systematisation ratione materiae, questions of international law were often treated with a certain degree of concern for its specific nature. However, international law as such was not yet fully perceived as a particular discipline, and its method was therefore still very much integrated in the general, developing, ius commune approach. In that sense, one could say (paraphrasing James I) that international law was 'in a manner (part of) ius commune". In this context, it is not surprising that references to international law did not require any specific justification. The paucity of explicit mentions of ius gentium in the Admiralty pleadings somehow reflects the lawyers' view that it was simply a component of the European ius commune tradition. On the other hand, it may have been more irksome to warrant the application of Civil law by referring to ius commune as such, rather than to the lex gentium. In practice, however, references to ius commune authorities only exceptionally presented a difficulty and did not need any particular legitimation.7 A negative example of such a controversy appears briefly in a case where, shortly after the Anglo-Spanish peace treaty of 1604, Portuguese merchants claimed that their ship, which had been captured off Lisbon by a man-of-war commanded by a Dutchman to whom Dutch commissions had been granted, could not be held to be a lawful prize when it was brought into neutral English territorial waters and seized by the English authorities. The controversial argument was that under those circumstances the fiction of ius postliminii might be applicable in favour of the Portuguese.8 One of the counsel for the Dutch captain, Dr Trevor, argued quod 1. postliminii et 1. postliminium non extenditur ad nos, sed ad Romanos et eos qui erant sub iure eiusdem magistrates.9 From a Civil lawyer, the argument may seem surprising, all the more so since the principle in question (the fiction of ius postliminii) was said to have been 'naturali aequitate introductum' (D.49.15.19 pr.). Perhaps Julius Caesar's note is too brief to allow a proper reconstruction of 7

8

9

References to 'ius commune', 'imperial law', 'pontifical law' appear occasionally in the pleadings. One draft contains different quotations which might be used for solving the question: 'Touching an Englishmans ship taken by a man of Newhaven being enimy and afterwards recovered by a Frenchman a friend, and brought into England; howe to bee disposed, 1591'. The quotations appear under the headings: 'Out of the ordonnances of France'; 'Out of the civill lawe'; 'Out of history' (Lansdowne 131, fol. 4V). The historical examples are taken from Livy, and the reference to civil law is a fine specimen of an argument by analogy: D.49.15.6. On this case, a more elaborate reconstruction of the different arguments is discussed in: Alberico Gentili and Thomas Crompton. An Encounter between an Academic Jurist and a Legal Practitioner, Studia Forensia Historica 1 (Leiden, 1992). Eventually, the argument was dropped when Alberico Gentili appeared in the proceedings as counsel for the Portuguese. BL MS Lansdowne 131, fol. 276V. The references are to D.49.15.5 and D.49.15.19.

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Trevor's reasoning. Did the latter imply that in his time positive rules from Justinian's compilations applied only to those nations which had been fully incorporated in the Roman empire and subjected to Roman law, but that this had not been the case with England? This was, indeed, a serious matter of dispute among scholars, 10 but it is hard to understand why a Civil lawyer who himself constantly referred in his pleadings to the various sources of ius commune would have made such an assertion. Alternatively, for reasons which do not appear in Caesar's notes, Trevor may have restricted the argument to some specific rules, in this case those governing the ius postliminii. When a more elaborate approach was required, as in the 'note' of which a transcript is printed hereafter in the appendix, the theoretical foundation of the applicability of Roman law is better documented. 11 Although the note's main concern is the extension of writs of prohibition, i.e. a jurisdictional conflict, the authors included a full paragraph on substantive law, perhaps because the application of a different legal system was, in their view, a strong argument in support of a specialised jurisdiction. The arguments expressed in favour of the application of Civil law in maritime causes are threefold. First, it is founded on the very authority of the Kings of England. Further, and to some degree justifying that royal policy, it is made necessary by the 'reception' of Roman law 'throughout all nations about us', which constitutes in that sense a form of ius gentium. Finally, the authors proclaim the intrinsic value of the Roman law for dealing with maritime cases, both international and domestic. In addition, the note contains an historical argument in its references to provincial jurisdictions in the Roman Empire and to the incorporation of Rhodian maritime laws. The whole argumentation remains, perhaps for purely opportunistic reasons, very specific regarding the applicability of Roman law in England, for its proper field is strictly confined to maritime law. Ironically, the note itself betrays that Civil lawyers were all too prone to extend the authority of ius commune sources well beyond the area of maritime disputes, for the Civil law provides in the same text ammunition for highly controversial considerations of the King's prerogative powers. When counsel refer to ius gentium in their pleadings, the expression is in most cases borrowed from their ius commune source. The references fall into two broad categories which correspond to the equivocal meaning of 10

11

A. Duck, De Usu et Authoritate Juris Civilis Romanorum, in Dominiis Principum Christia-

norum, Libri Duo (London, 1653), book II, chapter 8, first part, no. 11. The note is discussed by Hill, Bench and Bureaucracy, 47-52. Hill's attribution of the authorship of the note to Julius Caesar is, considering the heading of the memorandum (the whole text is written in Caesar's hand), questionable.

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the term. In the first place, it is used in the sense of Gaius' definition, i.e. a set of legal rules which, in principle, is observed by all men and applied in all nations. More particularly, this is apparently the meaning of ius gentium when, in prize-cases, the acquisition of spoils is justified. The principal authorities are the parallel texts D.41.2.1 pr. (s.v. 'item bello capta') and J.Inst. 2.1.17, the first of which was discussed at great length in mos italicus commentaries.12 The mere reference to ius gentium in the Corpus Iuris left, however, many practical questions unanswered. Prizelaw litigation was precisely fostered by the uncertainty of rules applicable to privateering. When no compromise could be found between the conflicting economic interests, Civil lawyers had a field day quoting ius commune authorities. Customary law is admittedly not altogether ignored, but it appears to play only a modest part in the Admiralty lawyers' arguments. Moreover, the precise purport of a maritime customary rule could be challenged and was often difficult to establish.13 When it became necessary to formulate a substantive rule of ius gentium, the Civil lawyers effectively fell back on ius commune. For the frequently occurring questions of acquisition, principles based on ius civile (in the strict sense) could provide the thread of their argumentation. For example, when it was stated that captors acquired their spoils by virtue of ius gentium, the question was often raised whether the goods had been captured as res derelictae, res nullius, or as the enemy's property (in which case it could be relevant to examine the validity of the enemy's title to the goods).14 The 12

13

14

In Caesar's notes, the best example of references to ius gentium as the legal foundation for the acquisition of goods taken at war appears not in an English civilian's pleading, but in a transcript of a legal opinion delivered in 1593 by the Faculty of Tubingen (Lansdowne 129, fols. 112v-131r). An edition of this consilium, which will not be discussed here, is forthcoming. For example, in Bromley c. Oliver and Gold (Lansdowne, 130, fols. 92V ff.), the plaintiff produced several witnesses to testify 'that the common use among marchants is, that if a factor shall first consigne goods to any cert, person, hee may not afterwards alter his consignation to an other'. The counsel for the defendants objected 'that the deponents touch, the custome prove nothing for that they mention not of any such cause ever in question of theire knowledge' and produced a new witness, who '[deposed] of a contrary custome: unles there were a speciall commission for the buyeng of the goods consigned in particular; for then the factor cannot alter his first consignation' (fol. 93V). A ius commune argumentation could also be buttressed by other authorities, as in a more complex opinion delivered by Dr Hammond in Dominus Admirallus c. Thomas Gorge militem (Lansdowne 135, fols. 95r-103r). The facts leading to the case are only alluded to in Caesar's notes. Possibly, Sir Thomas Gorge, who held Hurst Castle (commanding the entrance of the Solent), claimed goods from a Spanish ship. The goods may have been cast away during a storm, for the corresponding texts of the Corpus Iuris are quoted. The claim gave rise to a dispute regarding the jurisdiction of, respectively, the Lord Admiral and Sir Thomas. In his opinion, structured as an extensive refutation of the latter's claims, Dr Hammond addressed various questions which would now qualify as problems of public and international law. Hefirstconsiders the extension of the powers of someone to whom the King has granted a castrum, a complex topic which was familiar to civilian

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way to acquire possession was also often discussed by the standards of ius commune,15 but occasionally a lawyer could take advantage of the distinction between ius civile and ius gentium, as in the following example:16

15

16

lawyers: see G. Vallone, Iurisdictio domini, Introduzione a Matteo d'Afflitto edalla cultura giuridica meridionale tra Quattro e Cinque cento, Collana di Studi storici e Giuridici 1 (Lecce, 1985). The conclusion is that 'for so much as that castle is appointed for the safety of the countrie, it may bee that the capten hath in that respect marshall authoritie. But it followeth neither hereof nor of the wordes aforesaide [namely of the letters patent], that hee may lay handes uppon straungers' goods uppon the streame, or exercise any part of an Admirals authority' (fol. 96 v -97 r ). In a second paragraph, he discusses whether, at the time, there was a state of war between England and Spain. Subsequently, he deals with the acquisition of the property, disproving (inter alia) the thesis 'that hee [i.e. Sir Thomas Gorge] tooke [the goods] iuregentium, as goods held pro derelictis' (fol. 95V; for the arguments of Hammond's opponent, Dr Goldingham, see fol. 95™). The argumentation follows mainly ius commune authorities (including the opinions of the Roman jurists reported in the Digest), but also refers to ius proprium sources: 'they are taken to bee of other nature then those which as left pro derelicto; and are by the wisdome of our lawe assigned to certaine persons to keape to th'use of th'owner, if hee come within his time. Which it is like wee received from the costume of Normandie. For the booke of those customes hath one proper title, De varech et choses gaynes, where th'author of the commentary written thereuppon, expounding the word choses gaynes writeth thus, ne sontpasproprement res habitae pro derelicto, mais delaissees apossider par celuy a qui elles appartiennent, veluti animalia aberrantia. Which is th'example which Paulus useth before recited [cf. D.41.2.3.13]. And Bracton our countreman in his title de rerum divisione, cap. 12, maketh a difference betwene res habitae pro derelicto, and those quae pro waynio habentur, using th'example of cattle strayed whereto no owner maketh claime, adding this, et que olimfuerunt inventoris de iure naturali, iam efficiunturprincipis de iure gentium1 (fols. 101v-102r). Bracton's authority allows Hammond to conclude that since 'by our lawe . . . wayved goods . . . are given to the L. Admirall by her Majestie ..., it must of necessity followe, that my L. Admirall hath a cleere and a direct right to them, to keape them for th'owner if they bee demanded in time, or otherwise to enjoy to his owne use' (fol. 102v). For example, in Eyrning c. Nokes (Lansdowne 131, fols. 35ff.), it was disputed which of two ships had taken the decisive action to capture a prize. Large interests were at stake, and several lawyers appeared for both parties. They all argued about which rules governing the acquisition of goods were applicable. Dr Styward, for instance, held that 'que acquiruntur iure gentium, acquiruntur non aliter quam adprehensione vel occupatione possessoris, Jason in rubr. D. de acquir. possessio. num. 7 et 8 et 2 et 3. Alberic. in 1. naturalem, D. de acquir. possessio., § illud quesitum, etiamsi fera sit ita vulnerata, quod certum sit ex vulnere non posse evadere, tamen nostrum non fit, antequam capiatur. Et Alberic. in 1. in laqueum, D. de acquir. rer. domin. num. 2, potest quis acquirere dominium agri illaqueati per conspectum oculorum. Petr. Bel. par. 4, cap. 8, num. 15 et 16, rem que neque oculis conspicitur, neque corpore comprehenditur, possumus animo acquirere, num. 17 et 18' (fol. 38 rv , several articles omitted). From Pots c. Newton (Lansdowne 130, fols. 53V, 78 v -81 r , 91 v -92 r ), involving again the captains of two ships who contested each other's part in the capture of a prize. Dr Styward appeared for Newton and quoted several authorities on which he also relied in the case cited in the previous note. The quotation in the text, Dr Crompton's argumentation for Pots, is preceded by a summary of an argument developed by Dr Dun, also appearing for the plaintiff. It begins: '1. 1 de acquir. possessio. D. in princip. Instit. de rer. divisio., § item ilia que ex hostibus, que ex hostibus capiuntur, ex iure gentium nostra fiunt. In acquisitione dominii ex iure gentium, is primo acquirit dominium, qui prius nanciscitur possessionem, id est apprehensionem naturalem, d. 1. 1, D. de acquir. possessio., § Item bello capta' (several paragraphs omitted).

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In acquisitione ex iure gentium, consideratio est solummodo naturalis apprehensio, Jason in rubricam de acquir. possessio D., num. 7, 8 et 9. Dominium ex iure gentium nunquam causatur sine apprehensione sive occupatione possessoris, et ubi aliter sine traditione acquiritur, idfitex iure civile, non ex iure gentium. Et iure gentium statim ex possessione acquiritur dominium, ita ut nihil sit temporis medium inter possessionem et dominium. Jo. Francisc. Ripa in d. 1. 1, D. de acquir. possessio. num. 63 et 64, ad hoc ut transferatur possessio per aspectum, opus est ut possessor tradat vacuam possessionem: sed adversario possidente non acquirit possessionem, nisi primo adversarius eiectus sit. Mynsing. in § possideri, Instit. de interdictis, ver. animo solo, opus est corporali apprehensione ad acquirendam possessionem.17 Although the link with an act of war may suggest some association with the law of nations in its modern sense, the different arguments clearly indicate that the questions regarding the law of war and the acquisition of private property were considered separately, even when they appear in the same context. 18 Besides, references to ius gentium as a common law of mankind governing private acts were also borrowed from the ius commune by the English Civil lawyers outside the jurisdiction of the Court of Admiralty. 19 In the second type of reference to ius gentium, the expression approaches more closely the modern concept of public international law. Again, the civilian practitioners did not work out the concept on their own, but borrowed it from traditional ius commune literature. In Caesar's Admiralty notes, the English Civil lawyers seem mostly to rely on the authority of ius gentium when they discuss the freedom of international 17

18

19

D. Crumpton ex parte Pots, Lansdowne 130, fol. 80rv. It was alleged that the crew of the prize had meant to surrender to the captain of the other ship, but not to Pots: 'That Pots with 3 Flemings entered not into the prize till long after that shee had yealded to the Julian' [i.e. the other man-of-war], and 'that Pots should not have come on bourd them, but that they took him to bee capt. of the Julian' (fol. 79rv). For example in a short memorandum, 'Bona amicorum onerata in navi hostium capta in bello una cum navi flunt capientium' (Lansdowne 131, fols. 188r-189r): 'Ex iure gentium introducta bella et commercium, eque igitur sunt consideranda iura belli et iura commercii, cum ex eodem iure procedant, 1. ex hoc iure, D. de iustit. et iure, glos. et DD. ibi in ver. bella et commercium. Ea, que ex hostibus capimus, iure gentium statim nostra fiunt, § item ea que ex hostibus, Instit. de rer. divis. et acquir. earum dominio, et 1. naturalem, in fine, D. de acquir. rerum dominio, glos. et DD. ibi' (fol. 188r)For example, in Henry Newton c. Georges Brooke, a testamentary cause (Lansdowne 130, fols. 136vff.): 'Probatio iuris gentium non restringitur ad duos testes in testamento, Vasquius lib. 2, de testament, § 13, num. 23, requisito, 6, idem § 11, num. 68, Zuntius in responso pro uxore, num. 477. Quando probatio est iurisgentium, potest quomodocumque suppleri, Corneus in 1. hac consultissima, C. de testament., § ex imperfecto, num. 1, et sequent., Natta ibid., num. 151, Wesembec. consil. 98, num, 65, Zuntius in responso pro uxore, num. 66, Linwood in cap. statutum, ver. probatis, de testibus' (Dr Dun and Dr Hove for the defendant); countered by Dr Styward: 'Probatio iurisgentium est quefitper duos testes, glos. in ver. probationibus, 1. Lucius, D. de milit. testam., 1. 15, C. de milit. testam., ver. sub ipso tempore, Angelus in § plane, Instit. de milit. testam., Alexand. in 1. militis, C. de testam. milit. num. 1, 2, 3' (fols. 137r-138v, several articles omitted).

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trade. Both the principle of free trade and the right of the prince to restrict foreign trade under certain circumstances, viz. when the security of the realm is under threat, are founded on ius gentium. The two sides are highlighted in an opinion written in support of the principle: 'Tempore belli nullae merces ad hostes deferri debent.' 20 Because of the general purport of the opinion, the emphasis is not on the foundation of free trade, but rather on its restrictions: Commercia non sunt simpliciter libera, quia ex causa prohiberi possint. Quanquam homines liberi nascantur, commerciaque libera esse debeant, attamen secus, si a Principe prohibeantur, M. Mantua in 1. comparandi, C. que res vendi non possunt. Commercia sunt de iure gentium libera, nee princeps ipse nisi ex magna causa potest derogare, Laur. Silva. consil. 35, num. 14. Principes possunt prohibere transeuntes per viam publicam, item navigantes per publicumflumen;influminibuspublicis etiam inhibere possunt piscationes; item et vectigalia navigantibus per flumina publica, ac transeuntibus per vias publicas necnon pro piscationibus et venationibus imponere possunt, atque huiusmodi prohibitiones iure et usu gentium universali probantur, M. Anto. Peregrinus de iurefiscilib. 1, cap. num. 21.21 The ultimate justification for the priority of the King's prohibition of foreign trade is the national interest.22 However, the defence of the realm is seen to be an application of a general and more fundamental principle of natural law and ius gentium, which in this context tends to lose again its connotation of inter-state law: Vim et iniuriam propulsare iuris naturalis et gentium est. Est hec non scripta sed nata lex, quam non didicimus, accepimus, legimus, verum ex natura ipsa arripuimus, hansimus, expressimus, ad quam non docti sed facti, [non] instituti, sed imbuti sumus, et si vita nostra in aliquas insidias, si in vim, in tela aut latronum aut inimicorum incidisset, omnis honesta ratio esset expediende salutis, Cicero pro Milone. Bellum pro tuitione rerum suarum est licitum iure naturali, gentium et divino, Jason in 1. ex hoc iure, D. de instit. et iure, num. 39. Propulsare vim atque iniuriam de iure nature atque gentium est, Decius in 1. ut vim, D. de iustit. et 20

21 22

23

Lansdowne, 130, fols. 161r—165r. T h e purpose of the opinion is n o t clear. Caesar's notes begin with various allegations of law o n the question, followed by a more elaborate opinion attributed t o D r C r o m p t o n (fols. 161V—164V); the text ends with a brief concurring opinion from D r D u n . Similar arguments can be found later in the same volume, under the heading: ' A n ulla b o n a tempore belli ad hostes deferri possunt?' (fols. 180rf— 181 1 ). There are n o references to facts o r to any particular proceedings. Lansdowne 130, fol. 162 r . 'Salus reip. suprema lex esto, L. 12 tabularum. N e q u e ulla potest esse sanctior a u t reip. magis salutaris q u a m ipsa salus populi, cuius tanta vis est, ut q u e natura erant illicita, c o m m u t e n t u r eo respectu fiantque contraria' (fol. 164V). F o l . 161 V .

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As a result, and in spite of the conventional references to ius gentium, the decisive source for restricting foreign trade became the will of the sovereign.24 Not surprisingly, even the principle of free trade was sometimes founded primarily on the national interest, and thus on royal legislation.25 Similarly, the task of fighting piracy is presented as a rule imposed by ius gentium, but in practice entrusted to the prince.26 Neither these various principles of ius gentium nor their applications by Civil lawyers at the Court of Admiralty in London were innovative. The counsel still relied mainly on the late mediaeval mos italicus and the early modern legal literature which showed a large degree of continuity with that tradition. These authorities, partly of ancient, partly of mediaeval origin, did not reflect the new European international order which emerged during the early modern period. Yet, the emphasis on the constitutive role of the territorial sovereign in regulating international relations does to some extent express the changing approach in legal scholarship. In the absence of a uniform, clearly defined, concept of the law of nations, one should not expect that practitioners would have used the term ius gentium differently from its various meanings in the extensive library of ius commune. In the same way as the burgeoning literature on specific topics of international law (in particular, the law of war, the law of embassies, the law of the sea) incorporated much traditional ius commune learning, the late Elizabethan civilian practitioners contributed to adapting late mediaeval doctrines to early modern developments. In addition to the few explicit references to ius gentium that were discussed in the 24

25

26

A further example will be found in J. Requeti, N. Dornel ( = du Renel), Ch. Dornel etc. c. Capt. Duffield, the Crown intervening (Lansdowne 130, fols. 239vff.). In this case, the question was whether trade with a city in Normandy which had rebelled against the King of France during the religious wars was prohibited or not. Dr Crompton argued for the plaintiffs that 'commerce is lawefull by the generall lawe of nations, and unlesse the K. doe especially prohibite the same by edict, the same is still lawefull, and the rather betwene them, by reason of a convention betwene them to the same purpose' (fol. 245V). See also Lansdowne 132, fol. 82r (author unknown). In Le Porte c. Grenfield, Hals, D r Steward q u o t e d first a statute of E d w a r d III: '9 E. 3, cap. 1, a libertie of traffick graunted to all nations a n d t o all places, saving th'enimy. Declarat. an 1589 after the taking of certeine Easterlings goods. Saluti regni n o n convenire, ut hostes frumento armari sinamus, nulla neutralitatis facienda excusatione; q u o d d e iure gentium obtinet, ut constat a n . 1545, Galli et Angli hostes, Carolus 5. confederatus . . . (Lansdowne, 131, fol. 70 r ). Lansdowne 131, fols. 253rff. ('Whether piracies were p a r d o n e d by the King's generall p a r d o n at the time of his most happy coronation?'; possibly a note by Caesar himself, cf. fol. 253 r )- 'lure gentium omnes principes obligantur ad debellandos piratas t a n q u a m hostes publicos et totius Christianitatis, authent. navigia, C. de furtis, n a m sunt eiusmodi latrones et pirate diffidati omni iure, et impune occidi ex iure gentium, ubicumque reperiuntur, ut ibi et alibi D D . ' (fol. 253 V ).

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previous pages, their main arguments effectively dealt with a host of questions which would later be recognised as proper topics of international law: the law of reprisals (often including, in connexion herewith, the determination of denizenship), prize-law, the law of war. The cases always produced particular questions and in order to provide answers and arguments the practitioners necessarily relied on ius commune, combining both rules which were more or less specifically applicable and general principles of 'topical' principles borrowed from other areas.27 It was precisely the versatility of the mos italicus and early usus modemus methods which made it possible to address these questions of international law avant la lettre, i.e. before the modern concept of the law of nations had been established. 27

The term 'topical' here refers to the literary genre of loci or (in Greek) topoi.

Appendix: BL Lansdowne 129, fols. 80 r-82vl

[80T

A briefe note of certaine reasons giving occasion to judge that the King's Bench prohibitions and other proceadings against the Admiralty should bee voyde; delivered mee by Duck Lambe etc. 26. febr. 1591. First it appeareth not that there hath bene at any time till of late yeres any prohibitions or other such like proces against th'Admiralty, but onely against Curiam Christianitatis, beecause as it seemeth the Court of Admiralty being alwaies the King's Court as well as anie other Court of the Land, was not to bee restrained or enlarged but as it pleased the Princes to order it in th'Admiral's commissions. Whereas the Court Christian (that is to say the spirituall Court) was till H. 8. alwaies a forreine Court, and therefor to bee withstood by the King's prohibitions: least the crowne's inheritance by forreine commissions might otherwise in time bee wholy taken away. And whereas the statutes of 13. and 15. R. 2. and 2. H. 4.2 doe forbid th'Admirall to meddle with any thing done within the bodies of counties, or within the realme, and suffereth him to meddle with things done uppon the sea (saving for meames3 and deaths of men happening uppon greate rivers beneath the first bridges to the sea) the power of the prince is not therein denied or restrained, as that shee shall graunt no further commission, but onely that th'Admirall is forbidden to meddle, as meerely Admirall, further then with things done uppon the sea; and therefor the power and right of the Prince must bee considered. For the Prince being alwaies seized without impeachement of any lawe, in the right of her imperiall crowne of this realme, of all jurisdiction as well by sea as by land, and deviding the same, as by nature they are separated, into 2. severall goverments, hath ordeined the magistracy of the bodie of the land 1 2 3

Written in Julius Caesar's hand. Additions in the manuscript are indicated by the angle brackets. 13 Rich. II c. 5, 15 Rich. II c. 3, 2 Hen. IV c. 11. Read: 'mayhem' (compare 15 Rich. II c. 3, in: The Statutes of the Realm, vol. II (London 1816, reprint 1963), 78-9; and in: Sir Travers Twiss (ed.), The Black Book of the Admiralty, with an Appendix (4 vols., London, 1871-6), vol. 1, 412-3).

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to be exercised by severall officers, as the King's Bench for Plees touching the crowne, the Common Place for ordinary actions betwixt private persons, the Chauncery for causes of equitie, th'Exchequeur [80^] for rent, issues, fines and forfeitures accrewing to the prince, with other peculier Courts of like nature to theise. And the magistracy of the sea, to bee exercised by the L. Admirall onely, called the great Admirall of England, in respect there is included in his onely office all th'offices abovesaid with charge also of military affaires, as doth appeare in the severall clauses of his letters patents. As it is written in the civill lawes of the Romane Emperors, that unto the president of any place did continually belong all offices whatsoever, which were executed in the citie of Rome by severall magistrats, as4 at this day the same seemes to bee resembled in the provinces of Ireland and Wales, and the counties Palentine, and so in like manner in the province of the sea. The wordes in the civill lawe bee theise, Cum plenissimam iurisdictionem proconsul habet, omnium partes, qui Rome sunt, vel quasi magistratus, vel extra ordinem ius dicunt, ad ipsum pertinent, et ideo maius imperium in ea provincia omnibus post principem habet. And againe, omnia enim provincialia desideria, que Rome varios iudices habent ad officium praesidum pertinet, 1. 7. et 8. < D. > de offic. Proconsulis5 et 1. 10. et 11. D. de offic. praesidis.6 And < according to > this division of7 magistraces, the Princes of this realme have likewise devided the maner of goverment with 2. soundry lawes, th'one the common lawe of this land,8 appropriate to our nation onely, as best fitting those causes that happen within bodies of counties, where the eyes of iurors may give them intelligence to enquire and give veredict of truth, in fact of all controversies; th'other is the civill lawes imperiall for the sea, which for that by long continuance in the most florishing commonwealth of Rome, they have bene many ages since, the most perfect and the most equal [811] lawes of the world, are generally received throughout all nations about us. And therefor are not onely most fittest for our traffick and other dealings with straungers, but also (for such causes as concerne the sea) are most necessary to bee practised amongst ourselves. And in this division of lawes they seeme to folio we th'example of the Romane Emperors, who in deciding seacauses referred suters to the Rhodian lawes in all things, wherein theire owne lawes imperiall did not specially abrogate the same, 1. deprecatio, D. ad 1. Rhodiam de iactu.9 The Honorable seagouverment of which Rhodian 4 6 7

5 Crossed out: 'by'. D.I. 16.7-8. D.I. 18.10-11 (text quoted from the latter lex). 8 Crossed out: 'magistrats'. Crossed out: 'the other'.

9

D. 14.2.9.

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lawes (as Tullie saith) was in his time famous, Cicero pro lege Manilia.10 And that bycause the resort of all marchants to the citie and Isle of Rhodes was now exceading there, then in all the places of the worlde, and by that meanes the lawes of traffick were there most triedly qualified with all points of equity, Peck, in rubricam, ad 1. Rhodiam de iactu.11 And also12 bycause the commodiousnes of the place, and skill in navigation, and use of greate shipping obtained to that citie and island the space of manie yeres all gouverment by sea. And theise lawes of Rhodes nowe encorporated to the civill lawes Imperiall. And so to the whole bodie of both with th'auncient customes of th'Admiralty of England and actes of parliament concerning the same have alwaies governed seacauses by expresse commission from the Prince. Hereby it is manifest, that the magistrates both of sea and land, are equally authorised in theire severall offices to governe by severall lawes in like immediate degree from the Prince: and therefor if it falles out, that a question doth arise concerning the limits of either their iurisdictions, it seemeth that [81V] this question is not fit to bee decided by either of themselves, but rather by the Prince her selfe, in her owne person, or by such speciall commissioners or delegates as her Matie shall appoint superiour and indifferent to them both. 13 Adversus sententiam eius, qui vice Principis iudicavit, solus princeps restituet, auxilium apud Pretorem flagitare non potes, 1. 3, C. si adversus rem iudicatam.14 Magistratus qui sunt pares imperio, nullo modo possunt alter ab altero cogi, 1. nam magistratus, D. de arbitris.15 Praetor in praetorem, et consul in consulem nullum habet imperium, sed (ut inter eos ius dicatur) auxilium principis est impetrandum, 1. ille a quo, § penult. D. ad Senatuscons. Trebellia.16 And therefor, whereas her Matie hath graunted by her letters patents to the L. Admirall, magistrate of the sea, the cognizance of all causes, arising within th'ebbing and flowing of the sea and fresh water to the full, and beneath the first bridges to the sea, and of all other causes concerning the sea, wheresoever they happen to bee done under which termes the commission of all his iurisdiction is limited. It cannot seeme to bee lawefull for magistrats of the land, to prohibite the course of the said commission 10

11

12 15 16

M. Tullius Cicero, De Imperio Cn. Pompei ad Quirites Oratio 18.54, in A. C. Clark (ed.), M. Tulli Ciceronis Orationes (Oxford, 1938) ('Rhodiorum quorum usque ad nostram memoriam disciplina navalis et gloria permansit'). Petrus Peckius, Commentaria ... in omnes titulos ad rem Nauticam pertinentes. HagaeComitis, Ex Officina Hildebrandi Iacobi, 1603, Ad Legem Rhodiam de Iactu, ad rubricam D.14.2, 141. 13 14 Crossed out: 'And also'. Crossed out: 'Adv\ C.2.26.3. D.4.8.4. D.36.1.13.4.

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within those limits, without greate impeachment of her highnes prerogative and power, and uniust iniury to their equall. For whereas the statutes of R. 2. and H. 4. 17 are supposed to warrant the judges of the land to restraine the Queen's power in graunting such a commission, as though the lawe of parliament were not by her Ma tie to bee qualified in the rights belonging to her selfe: the truth is, that as the same statutes themselfes have not anie wordes to restraine or denie the power of the prince in making such a commission: so if they have it may well bee saide, that the prince may make a graunt [821] merely contrary to statute, and anie lawe positive to preiudice herselfe by such graunt, by a clause non obstante, 18 1. finali, C. si contra ius vel utilitatem publicam, 19 Baldus in authent. hoc inter liberos, C. de testament., 20 Francisc. de Aret. consil. 25, col. 4. 21 And the same statute is hereby sufficiently dispensed withall, especially where theise wordes ex certa scientia et mero motu nostris, are therewith also inserted, Alexander in glossa 1. 3, § si is, D. quod quisque iuris, 22 Baldus in 1. final., C. sententiam rescindi non posse. 23 And this power of the prince is grounded uppon that most certaine observation, that every prince imperially raigning is at free libertie from all lawes positive to annihilate the same, Zazius in 1. 2, D. de origine iuris, § eodem tempore, 24 vide de hoc pulchre distinct. Minsinger. centur. 5, observat. 97, 25 so they impeach not the rules of the lawes of nations and nature. And therefor the penalty of the same statute of 13. R. 2. and 2. H. 4., 26 videlicet, that the statute and the common lawe shall bee holden against th'Admirall, and that the pursuant in th'Admirall Court shall forfaite to the partie grieved double dammages, and 10. lib. to the Queene, being in this dispensation 27 avoyded, and no prohibition being therein mentioned, (as it is in all the statutes prohibiting the spirituall Courtes), it followeth, that the said 17 20 21

22 23 24

25

26

18 19 Supra, n. 2. Crossed out: 'fi'. C.I.22.6. Baldus de Ubaldis, Commentaria in Sextum Cod. Lib., Lugduni 1585, ad auth. H o c inter liberos (C.6.23.21.3), n o . 3, fol. 6 9 r a b . Franciscus de Accoltis de Aretio, Consilia (Lugduni per magistrum J o h a n n e m , Moylin alias de chambray), 1529, Consilium 15 (Reverendissime. Pater et domine mi. singularis et amantissime), nos. 6-9, fol. 14 v a b . Alexander T a r t a g n u s (Imolensis), In Primam et Secundam Digesti Veteris Partem, Lugduni (per G e o r g i u m Regnault) 1547, ad D.2.2.3.3., esp. n o . 7, fols. 5 5 v b - 5 6 r a . Baldus d e Ubaldis, Commentaria in vij. viij. ix, x. et xi. Cod. lib., Lugduni 1585, ad C.7.50.3, esp. nos. 5-9, fol. 76 r a b . Udalrichus Zasius, Singularia Responsa, sive Intellectus Iuris Singulares ..., Basileae, A p u d Mich. Isingrinum, 1541, In Iuris Civilis Originem Scholia, quibus L. II, FF. De Orig. Iur. Elucidatus, a d D.I.2.2.10-2, ad verba ' r a t u m esset', 228-30. Ioachimus Mynsingerus a F r u n d e c k , Singularium Observationum Iudiciis Imp. Camerae Centuriae VI., Helmstadii, Ex officina Iacobis Lucii, 1584, Centuria V, Observatio X C V I I (Quae sit potestas principis in tollendo iure tertii, et an contra ius divinum, naturale, gentium, vel civile statuere possit?), esp. n o . 10, p . 521 (sum.: 'Princeps c o n t r a ius civile, seu positivum statuere et rescribere potest, c u m ipse sit supra ius'). 27 Supra, n. 2. Crossed out: 'avoydded'.

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magistrates have no warrant at all to countermaund the iurisdiction of their equall, by anie such courses, in th'exercise of the marine authority graunted them by commission. And least this resolution shoulde bee a meanes for th'Admirall to deale further with causes of the land, then the commission authoriseth, when anie such proceading is offered, the partie greived may except against the judge's competency for such a cause. And if th'Admirall notwithstanding, will uniustly persist in proceading, [82^ the same partie may appeale to her Matie in the Chauncery, and then the iudgement and sentence of such delegates,28 as by commission, from thence shall bee appointed, shall determine that controversie 8. Eliz. cap. 5.29 Which authority of delegates is so confirmed by that statute of 8. Elizab. that theire iudgement must bee taken as finall in all civill and marine causes, and no further appeale or complaint to anie other Court is allowed. To the maintenance therefor of this Admirall seagoverment according to every clause of her highnes commission, her Matie enioyneth and commaundeth her L. Admirall to enioyne all subiects, of this realme to obey the tenour of the same her commission uppon paine of contempt and perill ensueng. And the contempt thereuppon growing to punnish by fine and imprisonment. Th'example of which iniunctions all other her highnes Courts doe put in ure, to defend the limites of their severall30 iurisdictions. And by this meanes onley the L. Admirall hath from time to time, and < so > 3 1 hereafter shall avoyde all such impeachments of the landcourts, offered nowe commonly at every common man's sute, uppon bare untrue suggestions, to the dammage of her highnes imperiall crowne of this realme, and to the overthrowe of that settled goverment, which hath alwaies remained in the same, to32 the greate encrease of traffick and navigation. Ordinatum fuit tempore E. 1. an° reg. 2, that all marine causes should be tried before the L. Admirall. 28 31

29 Crossed out: 'as by commission'. 8 Eliz. I c. 5. 32 Crossed out: 'shall'. Crossed out: 'theire'.

30

Crossed out: 'iudi'.

9

Stair's title 'Of Liberty and Servitude' John D. Ford

The problem with the title 'Of Liberty and Servitude' in James Dalrymple, first Viscount Stair's The Institutions of the Law of Scotland, is to explain what it is doing there.1 On the one hand, Stair expressed himself satisfied that the institution of slavery had little relevance in seventeenthcentury Europe, and none at all in the Scotland of his day. Adopting the definition in Justinian's Institutes, in turn derived from Florentinus' Institutes,2 Stair described slavery as a creation of the law of nations, at first arising when prisoners of war 'did loss their Liberty in lieu of their Life', later resulting from sale or birth (2.10/1.2.10). Though contrary to nature, slavery was none the less lawful, 'yet Christian Lenity and Mercy, hath almost taken away Bondage, except amongst the Spaniards, Portugals, and other Christian Nations, bordering upon the Turks' (2.11/1.2.11). Some southern nations, he explained, still found it necessary to maintain a supply of slaves to exchange for those taken from them. Otherwise the nearest Christian Europe came to practising slavery was in recognising the status of adscripticii glebae. 'Such are the English villains', Stair remarked, 'but in Scotland there is no such thing.' Although he did concede that until recently there had been 'a kind of Bondage, called Man-rent', he added that those subject to manrent 'were rather in clientela, than in Bondage', and pointed out that the institution had since 1

2

Quotations are from thefirstedition of the Institutions (Edinburgh, 1681) unless otherwise indicated, but since copies of the second edition of 1693 or of later editions derived from it are more readily available, references take the formfirstedition/second edition. In the first edition the second title is actually headed 'Of Liberty', though a fuller heading appears in some of the manuscripts. J.Inst. 1.3.2; D.I.5.4.1. W. M. Gordon, 'Stair, Grotius and the Sources of Stair's Institutions', in J. A. Ankum, J. E. Spruit and F. B. J. Wubbe (eds.), Satura Roberto Feenstra (Fribourg, 1985), 571, at 582, points out that Stair's account of slavery 'was very closely modelled on and sometimes even simply translated from' Petrus Gudelinus, Commentariorum de lure Novissimo Libri Sex (Arnhem, 1639), 1.3-6.

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been abolished by both statute and custom (2.12/1.2.12).3 In Scotland there was no 'middle condition' between ingenui and servi (2.13-14/ 1.2.13-14). 'The Servants which now retain that name', he concluded, 'are judged free persons, and have at most but hired their labour and work to their Masters for a time, which is a Contract betwixt them; of which afterward' (2.15/1.2.15).4 The only relevant form of service would be dealt with in a later title of contract law eventually under the heading 'Location and Conduction' (10.70-7/1.15).5 On the other hand, if slavery was obsolete in Scotland, that might at least have been taken to imply that liberty was the common condition of the Scottish people. Again following Justinian and Florentinus,6 Stair defined liberty as 'a Natural Faculty, to do that which every man pleaseth, unless he be hindered by Law or Force' (2.1/1.2.1). As a former Cambridge Regius used to observe, that definition appears to make everyone free, and as such fails to provide an adequate basis for contrasting liberty with servitude.7 Its value, as Stair understood it, lay more in contrasting liberty with coercion, whether by restraint or constraint (2.4/1.2.4), and it was with this conception of liberty that he was primarily concerned in his title. Once more, however, he was forced to concede rather lamely that 'The Customs of this Nation have little peculiar, in relation to Liberty directly, but the injuries done against the same, especially constraint, fall under the consideration of Delinquencies, and are so punished' (2.16/1.2.16). Whereas special actions for wrongful imprisonment were available under the laws of ancient Rome or Israel and of modern England, the Scottish 3

4

5

6 7

J. Wormald, Lords and Men in Scotland (Edinburgh, 1985) indicates that Stair's observations were substantially accurate, though, as Stair noted in the dedication of the first edition, a not dissimilar institution survived in the Highlands. In a much later passage in the second edition he admitted that 'some vestiges' of slavery remained in the condition of salters and colliers (4.45.17), yet no amendment was made to the title 'Of Liberty and Servitude'. It is clear from T. B. Smith, 'Master and Servant', in G.C. H. Paton (ed.), An Introduction to Scottish Legal History (Edinburgh, 1958), 130, and 'Master and Servant: Further Historical Outlines' [1958] Juridical Review 215, that something might easily have been made here of the quasi-servile condition of many Scottish workers. The heading does not appear in the first edition, where contract law was covered in one title. That Stair did not take the opportunity to deal with the relations of master and servant in his title on liberty and servitude is revealing. J. W. Cairns, 'Blackstone, Kahn-Freund and the Contract of Employment' (1989) 105 Law Quarterly Review 300, points out that it was still common for institutional writers to include the topic in their discussions of the law of persons in the eighteenth century. That Stair did not do so suggests that he had some other purpose in mind. J.Inst. 1.3.1; D.I.5.4pr. W. W. Buckland, The Roman Law of Slavery (Cambridge, 1908), 1, The Main Institutions of Roman Private Law (Cambridge, 1931), 39, and A Text-Book of Roman Law (3rd edn, revd P. G. Stein (Cambridge, 1963), 61.

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courts punished incarceration as a crime, and awarded civil damages, 'according to the Circumstances and Attrocity, and according to Equity'. It was in a later title on 'Reparation, whereof Delinquence, and Damages thence Arising' that Stair discussed liberty as one of several 'interests' protected by the general law of delict, also dealing there with the more specific delict of extortion by force or fear (9.4 and 8/1.9.4 and 8).8 So why devote a separate title to liberty and servitude? One answer might be that Stair was himself constrained by the conventions of the institutional tradition in which he was working: after writing about justice and law and about ius maturate, ius gentium and ius civile in his opening title, it was only to be expected that he would start his account of the law of persons with the distinction between freemen and slaves. Yet Alan Watson, who has done more than anyone to stress the force of traditional thinking in legal history, has noted that Stair was more liberated than many other institutional writers when it came to making adjustments to Justinian's arrangement. 9 Stair's treatment of persons is a case in point: after his title on liberty and servitude he went on to discuss 'Obligations in General', before dealing with familial, quasi-contractual, delictual and contractual obligations as species of personal rights, all prior to rights in things. Reflecting on that shift from persons to personal rights, A. H. Campbell demonstrated over thirty years ago how examination of the structure of the Institutions can afford important insights into the structure of Stair's thought. 10 According to Professor Campbell, the title 'Of Liberty and Servitude', far from being a lifeless witness to the force of the institutional tradition, formed the cornerstone of Stair's treatment of personal rights and connected his work with the most recent advances in legal and political theory. The key to understanding what the title was doing in the Institutions lay in realising that in the succeeding titles Stair was 'presenting obligations less in their aspect of rights than as limitations upon the right of liberty'.11 In keeping with the burgeoning natural rights theories of the seventeenth century, Stair was arguing that men were at 8

Stair's explanation for the absence of a special action was that 'these crimes are very rare'. Yet something might perhaps have been added about public imprisonment, even in a treatise on private law. The Claim of Right of 1689 listed the imprisonment of persons 'without expressing the reason' as one of the grounds for depriving James VII of the crown, and Sir George Mackenzie indicated in his Vindication of the Government in Scotland, during the Reign of King Charles //(London, 1691), 11-12 and 24, that the issue had been sensitive for some time, with periodic suggestions that habeas corpus legislation should be introduced. 9 W. A. J. Watson, Legal Transplants (Edinburgh, 1974), 37, and 'Some Notes on Mackenzie's Institutions and the European Legal Tradition' (1989) 17 Ius Commune 303, 310-13. 10 n The Structure of Stair's Institutions (Glasgow, 19»54). Ibid., 16.

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liberty to do as they pleased except where constrained by their obedience to God or by their voluntary undertakings to each other. Now Peter Stein has not only had occasion to examine the structure of Stair's Institutions in his work on the transmission of the institutional system,12 but has also commented several times on Stair's part in the development of legal thought in Scotland.13 In doing so he has warned of the tension that must have existed between the new thinking on ius naturale and Stair's Calvinist principles.14 What follows is an attempt to pay heed to that warning, first by looking more closely at the suggestion that Stair viewed liberty as a natural right in the modern sense, then by looking in an appropriate Presbyterian source for an alternative explanation for the inclusion of his title. The essay derives from an inquiry conducted with Peter's advice and encouragement. He may find some of what is said familiar and recognise his own influence; he may find other parts unconvincing and regret that more was not made of his advice; it is hoped that he will at least find something of interest. II Professor Campbell's contention was that Stair had learned to conceive of liberty as a natural right and of law as a body of obligations restricting the scope of liberty from Samuel Pufendorf's De lure Naturae et Gentium, another treatise in which consideration of man's natural liberty preceded consideration of the general duties of humanity and of the duties added by human agreement.15 Although there was no direct evidence of Stair's acquaintance with Pufendorf, the similarities in structure between the Institutions and the De lure Naturae made it seem more likely that Stair had read Pufendorf's book than that the two writers had drawn from a common source. What we now know, however, is that manuscript copies of the Institutions were made a full decade before the appearance of the De lure Naturae in 1672. To sustain the thesis that Stair was thinking 12

'The Fate of the Institutional System', in J. van der Westhuizen, P. J. Thomas, S. Scott and D. van der Merwe (eds.), Huldigingsbundel Paul van Warmelo (Pretoria, 1984), 218, 224-5, repr. in The Character and Influence of the Roman Civil Law (London, 1988), 73,

13

14 15

79-80. 'Legal Thought in Eighteenth Century Scotland' [1957] Juridical Review 1, 3-7, repr. in Character and Influence, 361, 363-7, 'The General Notions of Contract and Property in Eighteenth Century Scottish Thought' [1963] Juridical Review 1, 2-4, 'Law and Society in Eighteenth-Century Scottish Thought', in N. T. Phillipson and R. Mitchison (eds.), Scotland in the Age of Improvement (Edinburgh, 1970), 148, 148-51, and 'The Theory of Law', in D.M. Walker (ed.), Stair Tercentenary Studies (Edinburgh, 1981), 181. In part following Campbell, Structure of Stair's Institutions, 26-30. Ibid., 23. The most accessible edition of Pufendorf's book is in the Carnegie Endowment series, tr. C. H. and W. A. Oldfather (Oxford, 1934).

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along the same lines as Pufendorf we have to look for a common source after all. 16 In fact, Professor Campbell was able to cite one other writer who contrasted liberty with obligation in the manner ascribed to Stair, a writer with whom Pufendorf at least was undoubtedly familiar. In the chapter of his Leviathan 'Of the First and Second Naturall Lawes, and of Contracts' Thomas Hobbes had made the often-quoted remark that: though they that speak of this subject, use to confound Jus, and Lex, Right and Law; yet they ought to be distinguished; because RIGHT, consisteth in liberty to do, or to forbeare; Whereas LAW, determineth, and bindeth to one of them: so that Law, and Right, differ as much, as Obligation, and Liberty; which in one and the same matter are inconsistent.17 Immediately before this Hobbes had defined liberty as 'the absence of externall Impediments', explaining in a later chapter 'Of the Liberty of Subjects' that the term could be used with reference to inanimate objects as well as to rational beings.18 In the case of men, however, 'Artificiall Chains, called Civill Lawes\ could be added by agreement,19 and Hobbes argued in the earlier chapter that the first and second laws of nature required men to create these artificial bonds by contract. A distinction then had to be drawn between ius civile and lex civilis, 'For Right is Liberty, namely that Liberty which the Civil Law leaves us: But Civil Law is an Obligation', and takes from us the Liberty which the Law of Nature gave us'. 20 The liberty in question was ius naturale, the right of every man to do as he thought best for his own preservation, as opposed to lex naturalis, the duty to do so. Following A. P. d'Entreves, Profesor Campbell regarded Hobbes' distinction between right and law as a radical reworking of the traditional distinction between ius as facultas agendi - subjective right - and ius as norma agendi - objective right.21 Where previously it had been said that a person had a right to do something when it was right for him to do it, and thus when others had a duty to allow him to do it, now it was being said that he had a right to do the thing unless he himself was bound by a duty. More recently Richard Tuck has stressed that the new rights theories were concerned with the individual's sovereignty over his own domain. 22 The 16

17

18 21 22

Professor Campbell could find no parallel in structure between the Institutions and Pufendorf's earlier Elementorum Iurisprudentiae Universalis Libri Duo, again in the Carnegie Endowment series, trans. W. A. Oldfather (Oxford, 1931). Quotations are from the Cambridge Texts edition, ed. R. Tuck (Cambridge, 1991). References (here p. 64) are to the pagination of the 1651 edition, included in most modern printings. 19 20 Ibid., 107. Ibid., 108. Ibid., 150. Natural Law (2nd edn, L o n d o n , 1970), 6 1 - 2 . Natural Rights Theories (Cambridge, 1979), passim.

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crucial point for Hobbes was that although men were bound by the law of nature to preserve themselves, they had some freedom in deciding how best that might be done.23 The individual's freedom of choice was his natural right of liberty, a moral residue untouched by natural and civil laws; what was chosen consistently with those laws was necessarily within the individual's right. The new theorists represented by Hobbes also effected a radical reworking of the traditional definition of liberty. If libertas was still man's naturalis facultas of doing what he pleased except where prevented by vis, it was no longer limited by ius; rather, liberty itself was ius, restricted by vis and lex.24 In so far as men who naturally defended themselves against attack had the choice of the best means of defence, they could be said to possess a liberty or right. Their right was limited to the extent that they were in fact compelled in particular circumstances to adopt one means of defence, to the extent that reason dictated a specific course of action. Even where men did in principle have the freedom of choice, their liberty could be further curtailed by a voluntary transfer of their ius to an artificial sovereign, when ius naturale became ius civile, the liberty restricted not only by actual force but also by the laws backed up by threat of force. By this way of thinking, man's natural power was a matter of right while the law that limited his power was a matter of force. Now Stair clearly could have read the Leviathan before he wrote the Institutions, but he never mentioned Hobbes by name, and Professor Campbell was certainly correct in supposing that he would not have had much sympathy with many of Hobbes' ideas. In a later treatise on physics he dismissed the 'Horrendus Hobbesius' as an atheist 'who subverted all moral and political principles, and substituted in their place natural force and human agreement as the first principles of morality, society and political government'.25 These words might well be read as a resounding rejection of the new thinking, yet Stair was clearly indebted to another leading rights theorist, for he made no secret of his admiration for Hugo Grotius' De lure Belli ac Pads.26 Although Professor Campbell could see no parallel between the structure of the Institutions and the arrangement of the De lure Belli, Grotius is now acknowledged as the keyfigurein the emergence of the new thinking, making the vital move from saying that men naturally did what they could to defend themselves to saying that men had a natural right to do what they could to defend themselves.27 23 25 26 27

24 R. Tuck, Hobbes (Oxford, 1989), 6 2 - 3 . See Tuck, Natural Rights Theories, 26. Physiologia Nova Experimentalis (Leiden, 1686), 17. Quotations are from the Carnegie E n d o w m e n t edition, tr. F. W. Kelsey (Oxford, 1925). Tuck, Natural Rights Theories, 58-81, T h e " M o d e r n " Theory of N a t u r a l L a w ' , in A. Pagden (ed.), The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe (Cambridge,

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Grotius began by defining the terms helium and ius. The latter meant 'nothing else than what is just, and that, too, rather in a negative than in an affirmative sense, that being lawful which is not unjust'. Ius was therefore a residual category of right, and it could be defined more subjectively as 'a moral quality of a person, making it possible to have or to do something lawfully'. Ius was something that people had whenever the law did not prohibit them from doing what they wanted to do. Used properly the term was synonymous with facultas, whether understood as man's power over himself (libertas), his children {patria potestas) or his slaves {dominica potestas), or as his power over things (dominium), or as his power over debts (creditum, correlative to debitum). For present purposes two features of this classification are especially important. First, the traditional discussion of status categories in terms of the distinctions between freemen and slaves and persons sui iuris and alieni iuris was replaced by discussion of rights over persons akin to rights over things and debts; when Grotius eventually returned to the law of persons it was in the course of an account of the acquisition of rights of all kinds.29 Secondly, in accomplishing this transition Grotius did not simply replace discussion of the first distinction with treatment of the acquisition of patria potestas and of the second with treatment of the acquisition of dominica potestas, but also recognised libertas as a right capable of acquisition; like Hobbes, he believed that civil government was established when men transferred their natural rights over themselves to a ruler.30 Stair's debt to Grotius' analysis is manifest in the opening titles of the Institutions. He accepted that a treatise on law should focus on the rights of men, that there were basically three kinds of right - 'Liberty, Dominion, and Obligation' - and that 'all Rights consist in a Power or Faculty' (1.21/1.1.22). Liberty in particular he described as 'the power to dispose of our Persons, and to live where, and as we please, except in so far, as by Obedience, or Ingagement we are bound', adding in the second title that it was a right 'maintained by that Common received Principle in the Law of Nature, of self defence and preservation' (2.3/1.2.3). After dealing with liberty Stair went on to present a series of titles on 'Conjugal Obligations', 'Obligations between Parents and Children' and 'Obligations between

28 29

30

1987), 99, a n d ' G r o t i u s a n d Selden', in J. H . Burns a n d M . Goldie (eds.), The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450-1700 (Cambridge, 1991), 499. De lure Belli 1.1.2-5. Ibid., 2.5. R . Dagger, 'Rights', in T . Ball, J. F a i r a n d R. L. H a n s o n (eds.), Political Innovation and Conceptual Change (Cambridge, 1989), 292, shows h o w t h e language of rights came into its own only when more traditional notions of status began to prove inadequate. De lure Belli 1.3.8.

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Tutors and Curators, and their Pupils and Minors' (4-6/1.4-6), in preference to the usual titles de statu hominum. That he had decided to focus on rights, and that he had learned the language of rights from Grotius, can hardly be doubted. What should be doubted, however, is his full endorsement of the new thinking on ius naturale. The first cause for concern is his statement that liberty was maintained by a common received principle in the law of nature. Although Stair remarked in the extract just quoted from the first title that liberty was limited by obedience or engagement, he stated his position with greater precision in the second title: 'This Right ariseth from that Principle of Freedom, that man hath of himself, and of other things beside man, to do in relation thereto, as he pleaseth, except where he is tyed thereunto by his Obedience or Ingagement' (2.3/1.2.3). The right of liberty, but the principle of freedom: Stair had already presented freedom, obedience and engagement as the 'first Principles of Equity', three common principles of natural law providing the foundations of the rights of men (1.17-20/ 1.1.18-21), yet distinct from the rights of men (1.21/1.1.22). It was not liberty but freedom - of which self-defence was a facet - that was limited by the obligations of obedience and engagement. Stair understood that liberty was limited by restraint and constraint (2.4/1.2.4). He went on in the second title to list several possible bases for legitimate restraint or constraint, such as the failure of those under the control of spouses, parents or guardians to fulfil their obediential duties (2.5/1.2.5), the commission of a delict (2.6/1.2.6) or the breach of an engagement (2.7/1.2.7). In each case careful reading confirms that the point was not that the person's liberty was limited by the obligation but that his liberty was limited by the coercion which would result from failure to fulfil the obligation. Though the list ran parallel to the order of the ensuing titles, those titles were concerned with examining the obligations that set limits to freedom; the restrictions on liberty were discussed in these earlier paragraphs on restraint and constraint. Strictly speaking, then, Stair did not contrast liberty with obligation, but contrasted liberty with coercion in a general framework of law and obligation. If liber tas was ius, ius libertatis was 'the Law of Liberty' as well as the subjective right - there was nothing here to suggest that facultas agendi had been divorced from norma agendi. Nor would it have been easy for an orthodox Calvinist to have made that division, since far from accepting that ius was the absence of force and law, Calvinists were inclined to believe that fallen men could only hope to obtain ius in conditions of force and law. To maintain, moreover, that men in the state of nature had sufficient ius to construct an appropriate system of government was to come dangerously close to saying that men could work

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towards their own salvation without the gracious intervention of God. Although Stair could have followed Grotius (unlike Hobbes) without being accused of concurring with an atheist, Peter Stein has warned that he would still have been adopting the views of an author who was known to have supported the Arminians in the controversy culminating at Dort. 31 Stair did in fact continue his list of the bases of legitimate coercion by adding after breach of engagement that 'Liberty is diminished by subjection unto Authority' (2.8/1.2.8), and finally that 'Liberty is wholly taken off by Bondage, Slavery, or Servitude' (2.9/1.2.9), with the clear implication that both civil government and slavery resulted from engagement. But at no point did he suggest that men created authority by transferring their natural rights to a ruler. His riposte to Hobbes remains significant, and I have argued elsewhere that his views on the origins of government owed less to the new rights theories than to the Presbyterian theory expounded in Samuel Rutherford's Lex, Rex: The Law and the Prince?2 One other reason for doubting Stair's full endorsement of the new thinking is the separation of his treatment of liberty from his titles on the rights of husbands and wives, parents and children, and guardians and wards. Whereas Grotius had included the relations of masters and servants in his title De Acquisitione Originaria Iuris in Personas, Stair dealt first with liberty and servitude and only then, after a fresh introductory title on 'Obligations in General' (3/1.3), with persona! rights. One explanation might be that his thinking was even more advanced than Grotius', that he was drawing an analytical distinction between the liberty correlative (in W. N. Hohfeld's terms) to 'no-right' and the personal rights correlative to obligations in others. But to the danger of attributing an anti-Calvinist opinion to Stair this adds the danger of anachronism.33 An alternative would be to conclude that the title 'Of Liberty and Servitude' was still essentially de statu hominum. That possibility will be considered in the fourth section of this essay. We turn now to Rutherford's Lex, Rex in search of an ideological context in which it might have made sense to 31 32

33

' T h e T h e o r y of Law', 181. (London, 1644). My argument was presented to the annual conference of the Scottish Legal History Group in 1989 in a paper abstracted in (1990) 11 Journal of Legal History 134. This is not to dispute the point made by D. N. MacCormick, 'Stair as Analytical Jurist', in Walker (ed.), Stair Tercentenary Studies, 187, that modern positivists have continued the analytical tradition of the natural lawyers. It might be added that, as Peter Stein commented in 'Continental Influences on English Legal Thought, 1600-1900', in La formazione storica del diritto moderno in Europa, Atti del terzo congresso internazionale della societa Italiana di storia del diritto, vol. 3, 1105, 1119-25, repr. in Character and Influence, 209, 223-9, modern analytical jurisprudence had its roots in the Roman law tradition.

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talk of government, like servitude, as an encroachment on man's natural right of liberty, yet without it being implied that liberty was, as Grotius put it, a moral quality of the person. Ill When Samuel Rutherford first started working on his Lex, Rex he was persuaded by another Presbyterian divine to abandon the project as one 'proper for jurisconsults, lawyers and politicians', only to resume the task at the instigation of Archibald Johnston of Wariston, an Edinburgh advocate who was later to sit on the Bench with Stair around the time he began writing the Institutions}4 Johnston, however, does not appear to have been the sort of jurisconsult, lawyer or politician referred to.35 By 'the law' Rutherford understood the learned law, by 'jurisconsults' and 'lawyers' civilians and canonists like Bartolus, Baldus, Petrus Rebuffus, Covarruvias, and Vazquez, and by 'politicians' jurists like Bodin and Althusius. Though conscious of the distance between the disciplines of divinity and law,36 Rutherford read these authors as reliable guides to the universal jurisprudence with which scholastic Natural lawyers were equally concerned. In other words, he envisaged himself working in the same general area as the new rights theorists. Johnston's encouragement apart, the other reason why Rutherford decided to complete the Lex, Rex was the appearance of John Maxwell's Sacro-sancta Regum Maiestas?1 It was Maxwell's avowed aim to undermine the 'Puritanicall, Jesuiticall, AntimonarchicaU' thesis that civil government was a human institution established by positive law, and to defend the rival thesis that 'the King is onely and immediately dependent from Almighty God, the King of Kings, and Lord of Lords, and independent in his Soveraigntie and Power, from the Communitie'.38 The king ruled iure divino, and his rule could be shown to be necessary de iure naturae. Maxwell was prepared to concede that the people had the task of designating a particular person to be king, but he insisted that 'the reall constitution, the collation of soveraignty and Royalty is immediately from 34 35

36 38

The Life of Mr Robert Blair, ed. T . M c C r i e (Edinburgh, 1848), William R o w ' s ' S u p plement', 365-6. Like Stair, but unlike many other Scots lawyers, Johnston had not studied law at any of the continental universities. It is perhaps worth noting that when one royalist opponent of the Presbyterians, John Corbet, complained in The Ungirding of the Scottish Armour (Dublin, 1639), 43, of the Presbyterians' failure to cite 'judicious Lawyers' in support of their argument, accusing them of relying instead on Jesuit divines, he added: 'I know your Advocate Master Iohnstone is for you, but the question is too Deepe for his shallow brain.' 37 See, for example, 114 a n d 204; a n d cf. 156. (Oxford, 1644). Ibid., long title a n d 6.

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God'. 39 In no sense could it be claimed that the king derived his authority from the people. 40 Not only did the people lack the power of governing themselves, but they did not even have the power of submitting actively to government. It could hardly be denied by orthodox Calvinists that 'every singular and individuall person, by corruption and selfe love hath naturalem repugnantiam, a natural aversenesse and repugnancy to submit to any'. 41 The most that could be said was that the people had a 'potestas passiva regiminis, a capacity or susceptibility to be governed'. It must have seemed a bitter irony to the Presbyterians to be accused of taking the Jesuit line by a reputedly Arminian bishop. 42 Rutherford, who had established his academic reputation with a treatise on divine grace written 'against Jacobus Arminius and his followers, and the Jesuits', 43 was as open as Maxwell in setting his aim: where Maxwell had given his book the English title The Sacred and Royall Prerogative of Christian Kings, Rutherford gave his the subtitle A Dispute for the Just Prerogative of King and People. It was Rutherford's purpose to show that both the king and the people participated in the political process iure divino or naturali. To begin with he pointed out that no one contested the fundamental principle that 'All civill power is immediately from God in its root.' 44 But where Rutherford had to admit that the Presbyterians came close to the Jesuits was in recognising that the people played an active part in the appointment of the king. Though all forms of government were 'instituted' by God, he argued, particular governments were 'constituted' by the popular choice of one form in preference to others. Maxwell had said that the people were only really capable of 'consensus passivus, a necessary necessitated consent', a scarcely voluntary 39 41

42

43 44

40 Ibid., 2 0 - 3 . Ibid., 9 0 - 1 . Calvin himself h a d observed in his sermons o n J o b , quoted in C. Hill, Religion and Politics in Seventeenth Century England (Brighton, 1986), 123, that T h e nature of m a n is such that every m a n would be lord a n d master over his neighbours, a n d n o m a n by good will will be subject.' N . Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists (Oxford, 1987), 234-5. D r Tyacke mentions G r o t i u s ' role in the introduction of Arminianism into Britain at p p . 20, 68, 70 a n d 119 of his book. F u r t h e r discussion can be found in A. W . Harrison, The Beginnings of Arminianism (London, 1926), 200-3, W . S. H . Knight, The Life and Works of Hugo Grotius (London, 1925), 55-60 a n d 127-57, P. White, Predestination, Policy and Polemic (Cambridge, 1992), 172-8 a n d 205-7, a n d H . R. Trevor-Roper, ' H u g o Grotius a n d England', in From Counter-Reformation to Glorious Revolution (London, 1992), 47. Exercitationes Apologeticae pro Divina Gratia (Amsterdam, 1636), long title. Lex Rex, 1-2. F o r a fuller account of Rutherford's argument see J. D . F o r d , 'Lex, Rex, Justo Posita: Samuel Rutherford on the Origins of Government', in R. A. M a s o n (ed.), Scots and Britons (Cambridge, forthcoming); a n d for differing perspectives W . M . C a m p bell, 'Lex Rex a n d its A u t h o r ' (1941) 7 Records of the Scottish Church History Society 204; a n d I. M . Smart, ' T h e Political Ideas of the Scottish Covenanters, 1638-88' (1980) 1 History of Political T h o u g h t 167, at 175-80.

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submission elicited by force or constraint.45 In contrast, Rutherford maintained that they exercised a 'free, voluntary, and active power'.46 The theological argument could be turned round against Maxwell.47 Although Rutherford had to agree that the people 'through corruption of nature are averse to submit to Governours,/